THE NEWS that Lord Monckton was to give his “Climate of Freedom” lecture at Union College in Schenectady, New York, had thrown the university’s environmentalists into a turmoil. The campus environmentalists set up a Facebook page announcing a counter-meeting of their own immediately following Monckton’s lecture. There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus. The science is settled. Their meeting would be addressed by professors and PhDs, the “true” scientists, no less. Sparks, it seemed, were gonna fly.

Traveling with Lord Monckton on the East Coast leg of his current whistle-stop tour of the US and Canada, I was looking forward to documenting the Schenectady showdown. I have had the pleasure of listening to His Lordship at previous campus events. He is at his best when confronted by a hostile audience. The angrier and more indignant they are, the more he seems to like it.

The Union Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) sponsored the lecture, which was video streamed by CampusReform.org (where a video recording is available). The afternoon of the event, Lord Monckton appeared on the CFACT leaders’ hour-long weekly show on the Union College radio station. As a result, that evening 200 people packed a campus lecture theater to hear Lord Monckton speak.

Erin Delman, President of the Environmental Club, debates with Monckton - photo by Charlotte Lehman

As they filed in, Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair who was head of the college environmental faction. Her group had set up a table at the door of the auditorium, covered in slogans scribbled on messy bits of recycled burger boxes held together with duct tape (Re-Use Cardboard Now And Save The Planet). “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.

“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy? From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.

Lord Monckton was shown a graph demonstrating a superficially close correlation between CO2 concentration and temperature over the past 150,000 years. Mildly, he asked, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Was it CO2 concentration that changed first, or temperature that changed first, driving the changes in CO2 concentration?”

The student clutching the graph mumbled that it was impossible to tell, and nobody really knew.

At Lord Monckton’s elbow, an elderly lady – presumably on faculty at Union College – said, “Perhaps I can help. It was temperature that changed first.”
“Exactly,” said Lord Monckton.
“However,” she continued, “CO2 then acted as a feedback, amplifying the temperature change. That’s one way we know CO2 is a problem today. And what,” she said, turning noticeably acerbic in a twinkling of Lord Monckton’s eye, “caused the changes in temperature?”
“Well,” said Lord Monckton, “we don’t know for certain, but one plausible explanation …”
“… is the Milankovich cycles!” burst in the venerable PhD, anxious not to have her punch-line stolen.
“Yes,” Monckton agreed imperturbably, “the precession of the equinoxes, and variations in the eccentricity of the Earth’s orbit and in the obliquity of its axis with respect to the plane of the ecliptic. Actually, it is arguable that the cycles were first posited by an autodidact university janitor, a Mr. Croll.” The yakking crowd of environmentalists grew more thoughtful. Their propaganda had made him out to be an ignorant nincompoop, and they had begun to realize they had made the mistake of believing it.

Lord Monckton moved into the auditorium and began with his now-famous, exuberantly verbose parody of how the IPCC might describe a spade. This elegantly hilarious gem, delivered from memory, is rumored to be longer than the Gettysburg Address. Then he said that, unlike the IPCC, he was going to speak in plain English. Yet he proposed to begin, in silence, by displaying some slides demonstrating the unhappy consequences of several instances of consensus in the 20th century.

The Versailles consensus of 1918 imposed reparations on the defeated Germany, so that the conference that ended the First World War (15 million dead) sowed the seeds of the Second. The eugenics consensus of the 1920s that led directly to the dismal rail-yards of Oswiecim and Treblinka (6 million dead). The appeasement consensus of the 1930s that provoked Hitler to start World War II (60 million dead). The Lysenko consensus of the 1940s that wrecked 20 successive harvests in the then Soviet Union (20 million dead). The ban-DDT consensus of the 1960s that led to a fatal resurgence of malaria worldwide (40 million children dead and counting, 1.25 million of them last year alone).

You could have heard a pin drop. For the first time, the largely hostile audience (for most of those who attended were environmentalists) realized that the mere fact of a consensus does not in any way inform us of whether the assertion about which there is said to be a consensus is true.

Lord Monckton then startled his audience by saying it was settled science that there is a greenhouse effect, that CO2 adds to it, that CO2 is increasing in the atmosphere, that we are largely to blame, and that some warming can be expected to result. But these facts had been established by easily-replicable and frequently-replicated measurements first performed by John Tyndall in 1859 at the Royal Institution in London, “just down the road from m’ club, don’t y’ know” (laughter). Therefore, these conclusions did not need to be sanctified by consensus.

The audience were startled again when Lord Monckton showed a slide indicating that the rate of warming since 1950 was equivalent to little more than 1 Celsius degree per century, while the rate of warming the IPCC predicts for the 21st century is three times greater. His slide described this difference as the “IPCC credibility gap”.

Next, Lord Monckton baffled his audience, including the professors and PhDs (whose faces were a picture) by displaying a series of equations and graphs demonstrating that, while it was generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 1 C° of warming in the absence of temperature feedbacks, the real scientific dispute between the skeptics and the believers was that the believers thought that feedbacks triggered by the original warming would triple it to 3.3 C°, while the skeptics thought the warming would stay at around 1 C°.

A student asks Monckton a question during the Q&A period- photo by Charlotte Lehman

He moved on to show that the principal conclusions of each of the four IPCC “gospels” were questionable at best and downright fraudulent at worst. The 2007 gospel had concluded that the rate of warming was itself accelerating and that we were to blame, but this conclusion had been reached by a bogus statistical technique. By applying the same technique to a sine-wave (which the audience had agreed exhibits a zero trend), it is possible to show either a rapidly-accelerating uptrend or a rapidly-plummeting downtrend, depending on the choice of endpoints for the trend-lines on the data.
The 2001 IPCC gospel had abolished the medieval warm period by another piece of dubious statistical prestidigitation that was now under investigation by the Attorney-General of Virginia under the Fraud against Taxpayers Act 2000 (gasps of gaping astonishment from some of the environmentalists, who seemed not to have been told this before).

The 1995 gospel had been rewritten by just one man, to replace the scientists’ five-times-expressed conclusion that no human influence on global climate was discernible with a single statement flatly (and incorrectly) to the contrary.

The 1990 gospel had claimed to be able to predict temperature changes for 100 years into the future. Yet an entire generation had passed since then, and the warming over that generation had turned out to be below the lowest estimate in the IPCC’s 1990 gospel and well below its central estimate. For eight years, sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century. Worldwide hurricane activity is almost at its least in the 30-year satellite record. Global sea-ice extent has scarcely declined in that time. Here, the message was blunt: “It. Isn’t. Happening.”

Next, Lord Monckton turned to climate economics and demonstrated that the cost of acting to prevent global warming is many times greater than the cost of inaction. The example of Australia’s carbon dioxide tax showed why this was so. Australia accounts for only 1.2% of global CO2 emissions, and the government’s policy was to reduce this percentage by 5% over the ten-year life of the tax. On the generous assumption that the entire reduction would be achieved from year 1 onward, the fraction of global emissions abated would be just 0.06%. Because this fraction was so small, the projected CO2 concentration of 412 ppmv that would otherwise obtain in the atmosphere by 2020 would fall to 411.987 ppmv. Because this reduction in CO2 concentration was so small, the warming abated over the 10-year period of the tax would be just 0.000085 C°, at a discounted cost of $130 billion over the ten-year term.

Therefore, the cost of abating all of the 0.15 C° of warming that the IPCC predicted would occur between 2011 and 2020 by using measures as cost-effective as Australia’s carbon dioxide tax would be $309 trillion, 57.4% of global GDP to 2020, or $44,000 per head of the world’s population. On this basis, the cost of abating 1 C° of global warming would be $1.5 quadrillion. That, said Lord Monckton, is not cheap. In fact, it is 110 times more costly than doing nothing and paying the eventual cost of any damage that might arise from warmer weather this century.

Australia’s carbon dioxide tax is typical of the climate-mitigation measures now being proposed or implemented. All such measures are extravagantly cost-ineffective. No policy to abate global warming by controlling CO2 emissions would prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit from climate mitigation. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable would be ineffective; strategies costly enough to be effective would be unaffordable. Focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such future global warming as might arise would be many times more cost-effective than doing anything now. “If the cost of the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure,” Monckton advised.

In any event, said Lord Monckton, the West is no longer the problem. Its emissions have been rising very slowly, but emissions in the emerging economies are rising many times faster. China, in particular, was opening one or two new coal-fired power stations every week. She was right to do so. The most efficient way to stabilize a growing population was to raise its standard of living above the poverty line, and the cheapest way to do that was to give the population electricity generated by burning fossil fuels.

Lord Monckton ended, devastatingly, by showing that a sufferer from trichiasis, a consequence of trachoma that causes the eyelashes to grow inward, causing piercingly acute pain followed eventually by blindness, can be cured at a cost of just $8. He showed a picture of a lady from Africa, smiling with delight now that she could see again. He said that the diversion of resources away from those who most urgently and immediately needed our help, in the name of addressing a non-problem that could not in any event be cost-effectively dealt with by CO2 mitigation, must be reversed at once for the sake of those who needed our help now.

Both in the Q&A session that followed Monckton’s address and in the counter-meeting held by the environmentalists (in which Lord Monckton sat in the front row taking notes), the questions flew thick and fast. Why, said a professor of environmental sciences in a rambling question apparently designed to prevent anyone else from getting a question in, had Lord Monckton not cited peer-reviewed sources? He had cited several, but he apologized that the IPCC – which he had cited frequently – was not a peer-reviewed source: indeed, fully one-third of the references its 2007 gospel had cited had not been peer-reviewed.
Why had Lord Monckton said that from 1695-1735 the temperature in central England had risen by 2.2 degrees (implying 0.55 degrees of warming per decade) when he had gone on to say that the warming rate per decade was 0.4 degrees? He explained that the warming rate was correctly calculated on the basis of the least-squares linear-regression trend, giving 0.39 degrees, which he had rounded for convenience.

Did Lord Monckton not accept that we could quantify the CO2 feedback? This point came from the professor. “Well,” replied Lord Monckton in one of his most crushing responses, “perhaps the professor can quantify it, but the IPCC can’t: its 2007 gospel gives an exceptionally wide range of answers, from 25 to 225 parts per million by volume per Kelvin – in short, they don’t know.”

Why had Lord Monckton said that we could learn about temperatures in the medieval warm period from the foraminifera on the ocean floor, when the resolution was surely too poor? Read Pudsey (2006), said Lord Monckton: the paper showed that the Larsen B ice-shelf, which had disintegrated a few years ago and provided a poster-child for global warming in Al Gore’s movie, had not been present during the medieval warm period, indicating that those who said the warm period applied only to the North Atlantic might not be right. He added that Dr. Craig Idso maintains a database of peer-reviewed papers by more than 1000 scientists from more than 400 institutions in more than 40 countries establishing that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was at least as warm as the present and was probably warmer.

What about the methane from cattle? Should we give up eating meat to Save The Planet? The professor thought so. Lord Monckton, as always, had the data to hand. In the past decade, he said, methane concentration had risen by just 20 parts per billion, which might cause 1/350 C° of warming. This was too little to matter. Leave the cows alone.
What about peak fossil fuels? Should we not start cutting back now? No, said Lord Monckton. The recent discovery of vast and now-recoverable reserves of shale gas meant that we had several hundred years’ supply of fossil fuel. The professor agreed that shale gas had a contribution to make: it produced more energy per ton of CO2 emitted than oil or coal.

Why had Lord Monckton cherry-picked the Australian carbon dioxide tax as his economic example? He said that in a short lecture he could only take one example, so he had taken the Australian case because all other mitigation policies were quite similar to it. It was between 10 and 100 times more costly to try to make global warming go away today than to let the warming occur – even if the warming were at the rate predicted by the IPCC, and even if the cost of inaction was as high as the Stern Report had imagined – and to concentrate on focused adaptation when and where and only if and only to the extent that might be necessary.

Was not dendrochronology now so sophisticated that we could distinguish between the broadening of annual tree-rings caused by warmer weather and the broadening caused either by wetter weather or by more CO2 in the air? The Professor said this was now indeed possible. Lord Monckton replied that it was not possible. From 1960 onwards, the tree-ring series, even after all the complex adjustments made by the dendrochronastrologists, had showed global temperatures plummeting, while the thermometers had showed them soaring. That was why the Climategate emailers had spent so much time discussing how to “hide the decline” in the tree-ring predictions of temperature change from 1960 onward. This precipitate “decline” cast precisely the doubt upon the reliability of tree-ring temperature reconstructions that the IPCC had originally had in mind when it recommended against the use of tree-rings for reconstructing pre-instrumental temperatures. The professor had no answer to that.

The professor said he was emotional about the damage caused by global warming because in Peru and Ecuador he had seen the collapse in the water supply caused by the melting glaciers. Lord Monckton said that in nearly all parts of the world it was not the glaciers but the snow-melt that provided the water supply. Data from the Rutgers University Snow and Ice Lab showed no trend in northern-hemisphere snow cover in 40 years. He added that in the tropical Andes, according to Polissar et al. (2006), the normal state of all but the very highest peaks had been ice-free; therefore, it could not be said for certain that our influence on climate was causing any change that might not have occurred naturally anyway.

Why had Lord Monckton bothered to deal with the science at all, if the economic case against taking any action to address global warming was so overwhelming? Lord Monckton replied that it was necessary to understand that there was no scientific case for action either, and that it was necessary for policymakers and governments to realize that key elements in the IPCC’s scientific case – such as the supposedly “accelerating” warming that had been arrived at by the bogus statistical technique he had demonstrated with a sine-wave – were downright false.

The professor then asked the students in to raise their hands if they agreed with him that the IPCC’s use of the statistical technique questioned by Lord Monckton was correct. Dutifully, fearfully, about two-thirds of the hands in the room went up. Lord Monckton turned to the professor and told him he should not have done that. He then turned to the students who had raised their hands and asked them how many of them were statisticians. Just one student began to raise his hand and then – apparently realizing that admitting he was a statistician was to admit he had knowingly raised his hand to endorse a manifest statistical falsehood – slowly lowered it again, blushing furiously.

Another student asked, in that shrill tone beloved of environmental extremists everywhere, whether Lord Monckton was a statistician. No, he said, and that was why he had taken care to anonymize the data and send them to a statistician, who had confirmed the obvious: since the same technique, applied to the same data, could produce precisely opposite results depending upon a careful choice of the endpoints for the multiple trend-lines that the IPCC’s bureaucrats had superimposed on the perfectly correct graph of 150 years of temperature changes that the scientists had submitted, the technique must be defective and any results obtained by its use must be meaningless.

Lord Monckton, sternly but sadly, told those who had raised their hands: “You know, from the plain and clear demonstration that I gave during my lecture, that the IPCC’s statistical abuse was just that – an abuse. Yet, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to your professor, you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”

That pin, if you had dropped it, could have been heard again. Many young heads were hung in shame. Even their professor looked just a little less arrogant than he had done throughout the proceedings. Quietly they shuffled out into the darkness.
That night, the Gore Effect worked overtime. Temperatures plummeted to 14° F. The following morning, as we drove through the snowy landscape of upstate New York towards the next venue the following morning, I asked Lord Monckton what he had thought of the strange conduct of the professor, particularly when he had abused his authority by asking his students to assent to the correctness of a statistical technique that he and they had known to be plainly false.

Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”

Justin Pulliam is the Northeast Regional Field Coordinator for CampusReform.org. He graduated Cum Laude with University Honors from Texas A&M University in December 2011, where he led the local Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow Chapter. He can be reached at justinpulliam@gmail.com.

Brilliant, really! I wish I could see one of these presentations. I have some young acquaintances that I would like to bring with me.

It has been my experience that kids in the high school to college age are smarter than we sometimes give them credit for. Many are just spouting the party line, and it’s a shame that they are forced to regurgitate the nonsense in order to get passing grades. But demonstrate even ONE of the several MAJOR flaws in the cAGW myth, and they tend to become more skeptical of the rest.

I have many times predicted (not projected) that the wheels WILL eventually fall off of this cart…and when that happens a LOT of people are going to be extremely distrustful of ALL Science. As well they should be.

Stand by for the haters of Monckton to dance around the maypole and burn his wicker, wicked image, while howling their demented message of rage, that these heretics allowed him to speak instead of silencing him in servitude to the cause.

No wonder they avoid like the plague openly debating him!! But, wait for the snide remarks, the sly distortions as they look for one cherry picked word that can be turned against the man to discredit and divert from the very potent message he delivered.

The Australian folly of the carbon tax will live on in the memory of voters for several generations, to the detriment of the political regime that imposed it.

Thanks for the report, I hope that the West wakes up and pulls the rug from under the whole rotten charade, the sooner the better!!.

Excellent write-up- thanks! A reminder of why the warmists run from debate like Superman avoids Kryponite. Normally I don’t read all the way through such long essays, but this one reads like a thriller.
“110 times more costly than doing nothing and paying the eventual cost of any damage that might arise from warmer weather this century.” This calculation is without taking all the benefits of warming into account. I’d say the benefits alone outweigh the costs.

Atmospheric science is in on the side of the so called “sceptics”. The actual planetary measured warming is lower than the lowest IPCC model predicted warming. All of the warming is it at high latitudes where it was caused the biosphere to expand.

The fact that the actual measured planetary warming is less than the lowest IPCC model prediction warming and is found only at high latitudes (which is not predicted by the IPCC models) logically supports the assertion that the planet’s response to a change in forcing is to resist the change (negative feedback, planetary clouds in the tropics increase reflecting more sunlight in to space) rather than to amplify the change (positive feedback) due increased water vapour in the atmosphere.

Analysis of top of the atmosphere radiation changes Vs changes in planetary temperature also support the assertion that planetary clouds increase in the tropics thereby reflecting more sunlight off into space thereby resisting forcing changes rather than amplifying them.
Trillions of dollars are being proposed to be spent on boondoggle schemes which will not significantly reduction carbon dioxide increases but will have significant negative effects to the environment and to humanity. An example is the EU and US mandated conversion of food to biofuel (which is and will result in a massive loss of tropic forest and unsustainable increase in the cost of food).

Western countries do not have trillions of extra tax payer funds to spend on irrational policy schemes that will damage the environment and will result in starvation and malnutrition in the third world countries.

Carbon dioxide is not a poison. Plants eat CO2. A doubling of CO2 increases cereal yields by 30% to 40%. Plants make more effective use of water when CO2 rises which reduces desertification. The increase in atmospheric CO2 is unequivocally a significant net benefit to the biosphere and to humanity. Crop yields are and will continue to increase. There is and will be increased net precipitation. The biosphere expands when the planet warms with most of the warming occurring at high latitudes. That is a fact.

Science is unequivocally on the side of “sceptics”. No rational person, regardless of their political affiliation would support trillion dollar boondoggle schemes.

On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications by Lindzen and Choi 2011
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. An earlier study (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) was subject to significant criticisms. The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account. The present analysis accounts for the 72 day precession period for the ERBE satellite in a more appropriate manner than in the earlier paper. We develop a method to distinguish noise in the outgoing radiation as well as radiation changes that are forcing SST changes from those radiation changes that constitute feedbacks to changes in SST. We demonstrate that our new method does moderately well in distinguishing positive from negative feedbacks and in quantifying negative feedbacks. In contrast, we show that simple regression methods used by several existing papers generally exaggerate positive feedbacks and even show positive feedbacks when actual feedbacks are negative. We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity. ….
….However, warming from a doubling of CO2 would only be about 1oC (based on simple calculations where the radiation altitude and the Planck temperature depend on wavelength in accordance with the attenuation coefficients of wellmixed CO2 molecules; a doubling of any concentration in ppmv produces the same warming because of the logarithmic dependence of CO2’s absorption on the amount of CO2) (IPCC, 2007). This modest warming is much less than current climate models suggest for a doubling of CO2. Models predict warming of from 1.5oC to 5oC and even more for a doubling of CO2. Model predictions depend on the ‘feedback’ within models from the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds. Within all current climate models, water vapor increases with increasing temperature so as to further inhibit infrared cooling. Clouds also change so that their visible reflectivity decreases, causing increased solar absorption and warming of the earth….

Vast amounts of agricultural land are being diverted from crops for human consumption to biofuel The immediate consequence of this is a dramatic increase in the cost of basic food such as a 140% increase in the price of corn. Due to limited amounts of agricultural land vast regions of virgin forest are being cut down for biofuel production. The problems associate with this practice will become acute as all major Western governments have mandate a percentage of biofuel.

Analysis of the total energy input to produce ethanol from corn show that 29% more fossil fuel input energy is require to produce one energy unit of ethanol. If the fuel input to harvest the corn, to produce the fertilizer, and to boil the water off to distill ethanol/water from 8% ethanol to 99.5% ethanol (three distillation processes) to produce 99.5% ethanol for use in an automobile, produces more green house gas than is produced than the production consumption of conventional gasoline. The cost of corn based ethanol is more than five times the production cost of gasoline, excluding taxes and subsides. Rather than subsiding the production of corn based ethanol the same money can be used to preserve and increase rainforest. The loss of rainforest is the largest cause of the increase in CO2.

The Clean Energy Scam
The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.

But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.

Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.

Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’
Massive production of biofuels is “a crime against humanity” because of its impact on global food prices, a UN official has told German radio. “Producing biofuels today is a crime against humanity,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler told Bayerischer Runfunk radio. Many observers have warned that using arable land to produce crops for biofuels has reduced surfaces available to grow food. Mr Ziegler called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change its policies on agricultural subsidies and to stop supporting only programs aimed at debt reduction. He says agriculture should also be subsidised in regions where it ensures the survival of local populations. Meanwhile, in response to a call by the IMF and World Bank over the weekend to a food crisis that is stoking violence and political instability, German Foreign Minister Peer Steinbrueck gave his tacit backing.

Prime Indonesian jungle to be cleared for palm oil
Their former hero recently gave a palm oil company a permit to develop land in one of the few places on earth where orangutans, tigers and bears still can be found living side-by-side — violating Indonesia’s new moratorium on concessions in primary forests and peatlands.

Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free.

Not sure I would go as far, but there clearly has been a philosophical change in both science and areas like archaeology. The rational was not evil. It was that science was trying to deal with new areas like the climate which could not be tested in the way required of traditional science.

The “solution” found was to say that “truth” could come from consensus, opinion only loosely tied to experiments. Likewise in archaeology, ideas trying to include more than just the history of the elite which is well recorded, needed to make use of more nebulous data to redress the balance for those who were not so well recorded. However,likewise, this was a move toward opinion-based and not evidence based research.

There clearly is a need to attempt to use scientific-like investigation into areas like climate, and the environment where it isn’t possible (or ethical) to carry out experiments. But the danger is that by suggesting they are “proper” science, it undermines the credibility and utility of real science. Perhaps worse, the ideas that science is flexible and can be moulded by opinion is going to feed back into proper science so that we loose the certainty that this once supplied.

What we really need is for subjects to challenge and define the philosophical basis of their subjects. Better still, we need other subjects to challenge each other.

Unfortunately, where once science was taught as “natural philosophy” and every scientist had the tools to discuss the basis of truth in their subject. These days, even at 50 I’m a rare beast having done science with a module in philosophy. Most people who do science are philosophical illiterates.

The result is that subject like climate “science” is run by people who have absolutely no grasp of where the basis of truth lies in their subject. Unfortunately, the same is true of the scientific societies, and in a real sense science as a subject is deteriorating rapidly as the modern “leadership” utilise the status of the philosophically based successes of the past to sticky tape credibility over the incompetent and politically based pseudo-science and pseudo-truth and PR-led non-science of today.

Great lecture; should be part of any environnmental course!! In that case the audio quality should be of TED level.
Anyway, trying education and reasoning as you do Sir is a great asset of Western Culture.

Quite right!
a quadrillion is 10e15
if we spent that in dollars over a period of 100 years that would be 2.74e11 EVERY DAY
or, for those who like long numbers…..
274,000,000,000 per DAY
if we divide by a population of 7billion (short scale billion = 10e9)
thats 39 dollars for every man woman and child on the planet – EVERY day for 100 years – with a total input from every man woman and child of almost 1 million dollars over the 100 years! LOL

Perhaps if folk realised ‘anti’AGW action could cost them, and everyone they know, 1 million dollars for the next 100 years, they may have a slight rethink!!!

Loved the report Justin. The style made me feel I was there with you. However, try as I might, I have searched all over the Campusreform.org site for the video you mentioned and it is nowhere to be found. In fact, a search for Monckton only returns three hits from 2010.

A question I wish somebody would ask of CM is: Why is ‘global warming’ always seen as having disastrous consequences; and are those consequences better or worse compared to ‘global cooling’?

Excellent piece. Also since I see John Tyndall mentioned I would like to point out that he is my Great Great Great Great (I think that’s the right number of Greats) Uncle. Like myself he was also (amongst other things) a geologist and a proper scientist – unlike many of the charlatans who work at the institute named in his honour at UEA today.

Let me see if I can get the message of this report. It starts ““Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds”” – so that’s a good impartial start isn’t it…

Then it goes on like this “Lord Monckton was chatting contentedly to a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair “, “she shrieked.” – that is one nasty mocking tone with mysogonist overtones. But, there is more….”“That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. ” wow, that’s so patronising and arrogant it’s breathtaking!

I’ll see if I can stick a bit more of reading this shoddy piece of propagana of a report…”Mildly, he [Monckton]asked” but it’s “The yakking crowd of environmentalists” and then “Next, Lord Monckton baffled his audience,” you bet he did, but do you get why??? But “Another student asked, in that shrill tone beloved of environmental extremists everywhere,” yes yes, YES! I think we get the message – LOL!

That message is clear, Lord Monckton is a man without fault. A debater never outwitted, a truly brilliant man, probably the saviour of the world and the next messia rolled into one. But, environmentalists are, well, it obviously needs to be repeated over an over again as per my quotes.

Monckton is doing the world a real service by re-introducing the argument of reason vs religion to the climate debate.

That debate is what got the mediaeval Christian world out of its thrall to religious dogma and into the enlightenment, with much pain for people brave enough to lead the debate. It unfortunately didn’t happen in the Islamic world, and there we see a stagnant culture based on dogma and internecine warfare.

If the present era of green dogma isn’t cast aside by reason, then I agree with Lord Monckton that the West is over, and it’s every person for oneself. That it could have got to this point in the space of a few decades…who’d have thought?

I’m surprised you had to ask why the Professor behaved that way. It’s surely clear that he makes his living from regurgitating the standard AGW line (many do) and hasn’t done any independent research to confirm what he believed to be true. He probably had convinced himself that he was quite an expert in the area. How is he supposed to face his class on Monday with them and him knowing that there is a viable alternative perspective, which he isn’t teaching. The real giveaway in all of this is he actually turned up to debate, like a lamb to the slaughter. The smart ones, the one who really know the truth would have invented a reason not to be present.

A very informative event for the glimpse it gives into a group of students, and a professor, clearly out of their depth with the topics and at the same time emotionally comitted to specious views promoted by the IPCC and other promoters of irrational alarm and policies around climate. That is not of course a surprise, but it is still jaw-droppingly awful. But overall, my spirits were greatly lifted by this report. For three main reasons I think: first, Lord Monckton on top form; second, the students seemed to be shamed by their own ignorance and behaviour; and third, the very well-written account by Justin Pulliam which will bring this event vividly to a much larger audience.

WHY may we not have a debate ?
between Lord Monkton and one or two other climate realist of the same genre ? (plimmer et all)
as they say, the output of a team can be greater than the output of the sum of the parts of that team.
Each firing off the other for a real roller coaster of a ride through the subject that would be very, very watchable
regards

Lord Monckton
I’m thanking you from the bottom of my heart. I have not been moved so much for quite a while. Again and again I am in agreement and in awe, that you have chosen your words so well, and taken your stand with such classic honour and intelligence. On this matter of defending integrity, I feel I stand with you shoulder to shoulder, arm to arm, heel to heel, as I did with Alfred when he was defending the realm that became England. This is true even though, as mathematician to mathematician, I still disagree with you over some of the details of the future science.

Certainly on the right lines. but Lord Monckton is not correct to claim that the theory of GHG’s is settled science. That is why it is still a theory. Every day new reports arrive that cast doubt on this theory. Claiming that CO2 is IR reactant in the laboratory, as it is, does not mean that it reacts in exactly the same way in the atmosphere, or even more importantly, the troposphere where the atmospheric CO2 and water molecules are supposed to do the reradiation bit.

The theory tells us that there is a temperature anomaly in the upper troposphere, where this reradiation comes from, but this anomaly has never been found.
The theory tells us that as atmospheric CO2 content increases less heat will escape to space. Only last week came a report that heat loss from Earth has remained the same for the last 30 years despite a large CO2 increase. Along with this claim is the modelled rise of global surface temperature with rise of CO2. Global temperatures have plateaued towards a slight fall.
There is the research that reports that Vostok ice cores, going back 800,000years, clearly shows that temperature rises before a parallel rise of CO2 800-1200 years later.

Not only are observations casting doubt on this theory but we must ask ourselves why do the alarmists produce so much altered data, poor or ignored observation or just plain lie to further their cause. If their science was correct there would be no need for any of this.

And before any physicists, who may have read this far, get on their high horse and claim that surface measurements of inbound LWIR prove the theory I am afraid they do not unless it can be proved that this radiation is from the upper troposphere where the theory predicts. There must be many molecule-molecule energy intereactions in the atmosphere going through many energy levels downward. With the maximum molecule-molecule reactions going on near the surface, because that is where the atmosphere is at its densest, much of the measured LWIR could well come from the lowest 30m instead of the much colder upper troposphere.

Lord Moncton’s lecture illustrates why they DON’T want a debate, contrary to Gleik’s assertions. People have been mislead by the greatest con ever perpetrated on the human race. We have let other scare stories slide by but the CO2 CAGW scare should not be given a free pass. It has caused a vast diversion of resources to address a non-problem while real problems like preventable blindness and malaria receive less attention.

I hope that in future crimes against humanity hearing will be held. This is a scandal that needs addressing right now. / End rant. ;-)

“I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”

Brian Johnson uk says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator?
Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?

It’s his Religious Faith. I dont share it, but then I’m not being asked to pay for it. What is you point? Presumably that we can’t trust the opinion of anyone on any subject if they have a religious faith?

I’m sure Aristotle had a lovely phrase to describe that – I have a phrase for it, but this is a family blog so I shan’t share it. Though as a clue Aristotle has some of the makings of an anagram for it.

Many, many, deeply felt thanks Justin, and Anthony, for posting this – a thrilling, spell-binding read – just like an adventure story with surprises, twists and turns, suspense and laugh-out-loud humour; and above all scintillatingly intelligent. Humble congratulations to Lord Monckton, too.

The academics have a lot to answer for. I had LM out to Newcastle Australia on 2 occasions. On both occasions I asked pro-AGW academics to come to his lectures or engage in debate with him. All declined but were happy to give weasel words to the local media about ‘defects’ in LM’s presentations.

In Australia we have an expression for such tactics; they are flat-track bullies and LM has done a great job of exposing them; but, so far, the media has been a willing accomplice to their hypocrisy.

Imagine if warmists usually won the science debates — would they be insisting the debate is over?

The meme since the 60s: “Don’t think! Feeeel!”

That’s done lots of damage — people mistake caring for the environment for meaning you can feel your way into what’s right, rather than thinking about it. This has opened up the movement to pre-rational patterns: new-age; marxism; the noble savage; totalitarian control; religious authority.

Even the old moralistic patterns from the Western desert religions, namely, self sacrifice and renunciation, have been revived. An environmentalist told me point blank, “it doesn’t matter if CO2 isn’t a problem, because if you reduce CO2, you force people to reduce consumption, you reduce greed.”

That’s just 2000 year-old desert ethics. Deny money, deny liberty, deny abundance, deny consumption. But because rational thinking is discouraged, that’s what we fall back upon. I just hope it doesn’t spread too much before it is too late.

Whew, who dares to argue with a man who has such details in his head! Monckton wins these debates because of this command. None of his adversaries has such reach- they fill in with foggy ad libbed selections from the compilation of crib notes by the consensus.

I believe that a large part of the reason the warmists made such inroads in the past, and snowed scientific societies into endorsing their dogma, is that they had so much greater command of the “ammo”–the details of the debate. Studying climatology was their full-time obsession–their vocation. A few contrarians made it their avocation. But the warmists were able to snow them under with a stream of citations and out-of-left-field (unexpected) claims, and thus were able to leave their opponents on their back foot, looking like amateurs who didn’t really know the field. (Partly this imbalance in expertise was due to an imbalance in funding.)

To a large extent this is still the case. Their side’s top sophists are stuffed to the gills with ready-made responses, links, etc. Our side needs a well-funded, well-organized FAQ and set of counterpoints (with drill-down levels of detail) to counter Skeptical Science, etc.–A sort of Monck-bot. (If possible.)

Anyway, I copied t whole article to a Word file and plan to re-read it in the future.

I keep telling the AGW folks I encounter, if your side has such an ironclad case then set up a debate to be broadcast nationwide. Since the science is settled and AGW is true it would the best chance ever to embarrass the “deniers” and demonstrate how AGW science is undeniable. It would end the debate and everyone would become believers…I get a blank stare and yes, you can hear that pin drop.

No doubt Lord Monckton has put together and memorised masses of information such as is demonstrated here. But I find it sad that he has not yet really listened to those who could explain the science better to him. Thus he still makes comments relating to the false calculations of 1 C° sensitivity and the like when he states that while it was generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 1 C° …

“Generally accepted” … Who is talking consensus now?

Lord Monckton, if you read me, please return here for a link to my paper which will be available within 72 hours. In many ways you do a wonderful job, but in some ways you only serve to reinforce the hoax when you sit on the fence. Seek the truth! Don’t raise your own hand “in denial of the truth.” Never do that again,

“Lord Monckton said that in nearly all parts of the world it was not the glaciers but the snow-melt that provided the water supply.”

IF glacier melt was supplying the water, then stopping this melt would leave people short of water. Why do the believers think melt water is supplying critical water and also want to stop the melt? Do they want people to be short of water today as opposed to later? Do they even know basic thinking skills?

The article was enjoyable and informative. I wrote down the second paragraph of the comment by KenB. That thought applies to so much that tries to pass for intellectual discourse. Thanks also to p gosselin for reminding us that maybe the disappearance of the arctic ice and general warming could be a good thing. Though it would provide powerful, if dishonest, ammunition for the forces of totalitarianism.

No offense to intelligent professors, but some of the stupidest, most arrogant, childish, tempermental, and ideological people I’ve met in my life have been professors. And I’ve met my fair share. Interestingly in my graduate class the really smart students ended up in industry or as entrepreneurs. The sketchy ones followed the brainwashing of academia and became professors, miming the party line. Independent thought is dead in the hallowed halls of academia. It drives out the truly intelligent and independent thinking people.

SCHENECTADY, As an Australian I have heard of this place through american comedians of old, usually derided. I read in this article that Lord Monckton actually met one of the local comedians pretending to be a professor.

Monckton is doing the world a real service by re-introducing the argument of reason vs religion to the climate debate.

That debate is what got the mediaeval Christian world out of its thrall to religious dogma and into the enlightenment, with much pain for people brave enough to lead the debate.

I’m sorry to say it’s not that simple Maree. Firstly, Monckton is very clearly a Christian himself. Secondly, you have to distinguish between Jesus’ actual words (he said his work was to uphold truth) and what religion has done with them since. Thirdly, medieval Christianity itself introduced rational debate, if you look up for instance Alcuin, Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas. Fourthly, a lot of the preparation for science as we know it happened quite peacefully in the Islamic world. Fifthly, the early scientists were perfectly happy with the idea of God, just not what the Pope pronounced. It was more a matter of steady evolution, “when the time was ready”. Sixthly, all the great movers of the Renaissance were esotericists to a man (or woman) – a fact that modern Academia would dearly like to ignore; the evidence is generally somewhat hidden as the Church of that time (like academia and science today) tended to fear and punish those who touched esoteric realities, using classical tools of mockery and misrepresentation.

Truth is subtle, complex, and beautiful – but not for those who rely on belief to the exclusion of reason, even if this appears as an unreasoned belief in reason. In reality, Belief and Reason work together; indeed, we need both to progress, just as we need two legs to walk.

I agree with most of the commentators: this is an excellent presentation. However, it troubles me how cavalierly John Tyndall’s name is thrown around. I love these old school pioneers of science and I’ve read a lot of Tyndall’s papers and have yet to see where he says IR radiation adds heat energy to the bottom of a container when convection is unconstrained. What is the nature of these easily replicable experiments? They really prove the concept of heating via “back radiation”? Please provide a link so I can see for myself.

Excellent report. We are so lucky to have someone of Lord Momcktons ability on our side.

Regarding the couple of snipes in these comments – does anyone actually have anything in Lord Moncktons talk that they disagree with or is it just a matter of sniping because they have no point to raise?

Doug Cotton:
I look forward to your article. However, the admission of a few basic “widely accepted” facts, all be they open to question, is an essential debating tactic to move the argument to where the opposition has little if any evidence to support its argument.

Into the lions den. We need to clone Monckton and send thousands of him into the universities!

It’s reminiscient of Sir Keith (later Lord) Joseph, a UK Conservative politician and intellectual who in the early 70s was converted to Friedman and Hayek. He then took his message into the universities, then hotbeds of communist activism.

Eggs were thrown; activists disrupted his speeches; somethimes he had to be bundled away by the police for protection. But he kept going, and perhaps contributed to a change in the intellectual climate from 70s statism to 80s free-market reformism under Thatcher.

“Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”

Great lecture Lord Monckton !
Thanks for delivering the story. A Job Well Done Justin Pulliam !!
Lord Monckton, we need Your help here in EU too – desperately.
Lectures for the European Council and in the European Parliament would be great. We waste annually billions of euros with the CO 2-hype – based on EU decisions.

Having had the pleasure of a short one-on-one with Lord Monckton, I can assert with confidence that he has elements of genius, or as a very minimum, that rare quality named a photographic memory.
It would be distressing to have him arguing “the other side”; but he seems to contemplate no other side. He prefers to speak of evidence that people assemble with enough care for him to accept it as a viable hypothesis, whatever the implications might be.
This is shown in history as a mark of a top scientist, though he makes no claim to be one. Conversely, many top scientists make the very mistakes that he avoids.

There’s a large number of students at Boise State University who could benefit greatly from this presentation by Lord Monkton.

Just because some of the western States like Idaho and Wyoming are pretty solidly “red states” doesn’t mean they don’t have a large number of leftocrats in their largest cities.

That’s pretty much the case for Oregon and Washington as well, but unfortunately for them the metro concentrations are large enough they do whatever they want and the people outside there have essentially no influence on how their government operates or on what it inflicts on them.

I’d love to see Monkton do a tour of all the State Capitols or the largest city in each State (some State Capitol cities have paradoxically managed to stay rather small) or the cities with the largest concentrations of college and university students.

Our future lies with each generation of the ages 19 to 24 as they pass through what is supposed to be higher education. But what of our future when those people are taught lies?

William Astley says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:56 am
——snip—-
The Clean Energy Scam
The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
—-SNIP—-

“But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended”

This is totally untrue – it is doing exactly what its proponents intended, it is making them and their friends richer. There was never any intent for any impact on ‘global warming’ although there may be some ‘useful idiots’ who may have believed so. Like all ‘green power’ and associated activities it is a money laundering scheme to pass taxpayers’ money to politically favored groups and individuals. Money is also made in administering these schemes by the friends of those in power; that is why the multinational banks are so keen and always involved.

Doug Cotton says:
March 10, 2012 at 3:19 am
No doubt Lord Monckton has put together and memorised masses of information such as is demonstrated here. But I find it sad that he has not yet really listened to those who could explain the science better to him. Thus he still makes comments relating to the false calculations of 1 C° sensitivity and the like when he states that while it was generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 1 C° …

“Generally accepted” … Who is talking consensus now?

Lord Monckton, if you read me, please return here for a link to my paper which will be available within 72 hours. In many ways you do a wonderful job, but in some ways you only serve to reinforce the hoax when you sit on the fence. Seek the truth! Don’t raise your own hand “in denial of the truth.” Never do that again,

Doug you are misunderstanding the debating style. The point was that ‘even if we take what your consensus says to be true’ the arguments for spending money to mitigate that 1C warming are invalid.

I wonder if the Main Stream Media will mention this Lord Monckton event or any of the others. I wonder if the Main Stream Media will tell the public anything that goes against the Watermelon Agenda.

Lord Monckton said we are in danger of losing the West to a new dark age. He is wrong: we are already there. Reason is no longer respected other than a little lip service once in a while by those who don’t really know what reason is.

Lucy Skywalker says:
March 10, 2012 at 3:05 amThis is the piece that should be shown alongside every school showing of An Inconvenient Untruth.

That was my thought as I finished reading it! That every teacher who wants to show the Gorababble should show this too, and watch it.. IIRC, the judge in the ruling against An Inconvenient Truth being shown in schools said it wasn’t science and if it was shown had to be presented with the claims corrected, there were several points.

Excellent piece all round; well tailored to the audience, well spoken, well written and well blogged.

All the makings of a “classic”.

As to the accusations of misogynism – , gender descriptive is not gender biased, read the Suzuki thread for more examples of… “There’s a CONSENSUS!” she shrieked.”

““That, Madame, is intellectual baby-talk,” replied Lord Monckton. Had she not heard of Aristotle’s codification of the commonest logical fallacies in human discourse, including that which the medieval schoolmen would later describe as the argumentum ad populum, the headcount fallacy? From her reddening face and baffled expression, it was possible to deduce that she had not. Nor had she heard of the argumentum ad verecundiam, the fallacy of appealing to the reputation of those in authority.”

These students young, bright and brainwashed, still with the honesty to blush, would Suzuki be so discomfitted?

There is no doubt that Lord Monkton is one of the world’s great orators. However; it is not the fault of the students at Schenectady that they were unprepared for this onslaught. Young people are now brainwashed from an early age to believe the Global Warming narrative as a matter of faith. Thus, the greatest scientific scandal of all time is maintained by simply denying them the opportunity to hear any dissenting voices. A well prepared sceptic should win any debate.
Lord Monkton’s strong point is that he starts by saying that there is a greenhouse effect and that CO2 adds to it. This immediately disarms al those who brought along their physics books expecting to hear arguments from the Claes Johnson’s Book of Nonsense. The debate is then focussed on the science that the CO2 absorption bands are known to be saturated, or nearly so. The accumulated scientific knowledge of the ages is now on the side of the sceptic, as much or more so than it is on the side of the alarmist. Whilst there may be a consensus on the basic science of radiative transfer, there is no consensus on the mysterious, unquantified ‘feedback effect’. .When we speak of 1000’s of scientists agreeing – they certainly don’t agree on that.

If people don’t understand what is meant by saturation of the CO2 absorption band let me recall Warren Meyer’s superb analogy. It is like painting a window to block out the light. The first paint of coat cuts out most of light but some will still get through. A second coat is then applied that cuts out most of the remaining light – but not all of it and so more coats are applied. The first coat of paint had a large effect, but each successive coat has a smaller and smaller effect. That is how the ( logarithmic effect of ) CO2 works. Most of the warming from CO2 we already have – and there is no doubt that it is beneficial. Adding more will have some effect, but like the extra coats of paint, it won’t be much. The accepted figure, all other things being equal, is about one degree warming for a doubling of today’s CO2 concentration. The oil and gas may run out before this is achieved – so what’s the problem? Without the elusive, unproven feedback effect there is no problem.

Brian Johnson uk says:
Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator?
Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?

Since he never brought it up with the students, the question is a red herring. He stayed on topic.
His comment after the lecture, which seems to be your issue, reflects his moral base and societies current state, as he sees it.

Getting back to your question, its mirror is “Prove there is no creator.”
In either case you are arguing hypothesis, which is always fun but not too productive, since hypothesis, no matter what the discipline, require a leap from facts to faith.

The questions you should have asked are, “Which group is based on faith and which on science?” “Which group allows no challenge to its orthodoxy.”

That would answer your question, “Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?”

Brian Johnson uk says: March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator? Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?

Mr. Johnson can you explain how the Big Bang theory squares with the first law of thermodynamics? Or if you prefer where did the universe come from thru ’cause & effect’. We know the effect what was the cause?

Very nicely written Justin. Reading your post made me feel like I was there. I wonder how many more professors will allow themselves such humiliation in front of their students. But I commend the 200 students who showed up and let Monckton speak. To be so respectful as to be able to hear a pin drop shows some class.

Reblogged this on YFN Georgia LLC and commented:
Professional stirrer Lord Monckton on the greenhouse effects of cattle.
“What about the methane from cattle? Should we give up eating meat to Save The Planet? The professor thought so. Lord Monckton, as always, had the data to hand. In the past decade, he said, methane concentration had risen by just 20 parts per billion, which might cause 1/350 C° of warming. This was too little to matter. Leave the cows alone.”

Gee thanks for that, I really enjoyed it. I saw him speak in Perth WA two years ago, wonderful stuff. I would love to see him debate Gore on national television. I am 110% sure that Gore would say: NO! Shame as he would rip Gore to shreds.

Well, AGW-advocates pontificate about AGW when they don’t know anything about that, so I suppose Geoghegan thought nobody would laugh at his nonsense.

Of course we want erudite, intelligent and informed people such as Monckton presenting the truth.

And we don’t have a “team”: but AGW-advocates do as the Climategate emails reveal.

Peter H gives the best laugh in his post at March 10, 2012 at 2:28 am. I commend anybody who wants a good laugh to read all of it. It begins:

“Let me see if I can get the message of this report. It starts ““Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds”” – so that’s a good impartial start isn’t it…”

But Monckton made no claim to be “impartial”. On the contrary he was speaking to refute the partisan propaganda circulated by IPCC, Greenpeace, WWF, etc..

And Peter H clearly fails in reading comprehension because he does not mention “the message of this report” which was that Monckton provided a cogent and convincing argument summarised in this paragraph:

“Therefore, the cost of abating all of the 0.15 C° of warming that the IPCC predicted would occur between 2011 and 2020 by using measures as cost-effective as Australia’s carbon dioxide tax would be $309 trillion, 57.4% of global GDP to 2020, or $44,000 per head of the world’s population. On this basis, the cost of abating 1 C° of global warming would be $1.5 quadrillion. That, said Lord Monckton, is not cheap. In fact, it is 110 times more costly than doing nothing and paying the eventual cost of any damage that might arise from warmer weather this century.”

Peter H concludes by saying, “Sad really”. In this he is mistaken because the comment by Perter H is very, very funny and not “sad”.

So, I write to commend reading the troll comments because everybody enjoys getting a good-belly laugh.

At times, I have found Viscount Monckton to go somewhat OTT, but his debating prowess is truly excellent. This report restores some of my faith that today’s students may be able to think for themselves one day. I know that sounds condescending, but it has been one of the saddest aspects of this (non)debate that there is so much acceptance and so little questioning.

This letter from Nigel Lawson is relevant as it describes his research-led opinions on CAGW:

Brian Johnson uk says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator?
Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?

Your questions are OT and suggest that a ‘Proof’ has an external reality, but it has not; it is an axiom and belief and has an intellectually social consensus. ‘An axiom or postulate is a proposition that is not and cannot be proven within the system based on them’. You can try to show that a proof has reality, which can be proved by science, but that is impossibel, because that what is recognized as true, is not to be shown -> ‘there’.

Great write up Justin but you had me at the second picture! How Monckton can even stand up in front of these ill educated faithful is beyond me!

Can anyone explain to me how the professor of environmental sciences can stand in front of his adoring faithful next week and lecture? I think my sick-note would already be on the Chancellors desk! Or application for a Sabbatical!

This reminds me of my college days. When I was in college, one type of question was sure to cause a student’s brain to freeze faster than an old Windows 95 computer: “What do you think …” I had a professor who asked that question quite often, and the students hated him. They wanted to be told, not made to think. Schools and colleges give people head knowledge and indoctrinate people, but they do not teach the most important skills of all: reasoning and critical thinking. We are becoming educated slaves.

This is a man who will never win a Nobel prize, this is a man who wouldnt accept one if it were offered of that I am sure, this is the man who challenges consensus ignorance and has suffered the slings and arrows of the supporters of that consensus. There truly are heroes who walk among us, who would most likely scorn the title, who will never be given the laurels he deserves in this life and nor would he care of that I have no doubt. This man alone shows us why the CAGW fraud will fail, was always going to fail. There are sadly all too few of men like Monckton in the world but perhaps these happy few are all we need against the legions of consensus ignorance.

God Bless Lord Monckton. However as I continue to dig into this whole aspect of warming, and again the primary reason with me was because of my forecast protocol which is know the past, understand the present and you have a CHANCE at getting the future right, I am becoming convinced that the next great nail in the AGW coffin will be the realization that it is not possible for co2 to cause any warming, yet alone the minor amounts that are attributed to it. The disconnect now has become obvious, and as Einstein said ( paraphrased) it only takes one contradiction to disprove a theory. In this case the last 17 years, the recent cooldown that has started ( since the pdo flip) and the midlevel temps responding in almost perfect timing ( with a lag) to the enso antics shows this is over.

Again this link, is essential to open our minds about the idea that co2 can not cause any warming. It is my mission to get this out for all to see, to open minds to what I think makes a heck of a lot of sense!

As a side note, everytime I come to WUWT to look at one of the reference pages, I get sidetracked by yet another great article. If I asked God to bless Lord Monckton, then I must also ask him to do so for Anthony Watts!

Who cares? I don’t have to pay massive taxes to a bunch of government-funded scientists with the sole aim of proving him right. His beliefs affect me not one iota. He can believe whatever the hell he wants as long as I don’t have to change my lifestyle to accommodate him. You have a problem with that?

I appreciate that Lord Monckton used 1950 which was near the beginning of the acceleration of increase in CO2 levels and was 62 years ago. The cycle in the temperature data is about 60 to 66 years in length, so he will be comparing values from then to now when we are at similar points in the cycle.

If Gleick is brought to justice, perhaps one part of his punishment ought to be 1000 hours of community service debating Lord Monckton on AGW at all of the major universities around the country. Charge a nominal entrance fee and we could cut the deficit in half…

Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?
________________________________________
As an Agnostic I find that hilarious. If all you can come up with is an attack on Lord Monckton’s faith than you have just admitted defeat!

At least here in the USA we have religious freedom…. Or did, but then you would never know it by the repeated attacks on the faith of Christians in the media.

I’m most grateful to Justin Pulliam for having been so thoughtful and helpful a guide during the East Coast leg of my current speaking tour of the US and Canada. For once the environmentalist faction stumbled into a real debate, and I am most grateful to Anthony Watts for putting this revealing account of it on the record in his influential blog, which now carries more weight than most “mainstream” news media, and a great deal more information.

Some commenters have had difficulty in getting access to the video of my lecture at Union College. Professor Larry Gould of Hartford University, with his characteristic thoroughness, has posted up the fuller version of the lecture that I had the honor to give at his university in the presence of its president, Walter Harrison. Larry has helpfully included all the slides in the right places. The link is:

One commenter has asked why, since I oppose the notion of doing science by consensus, I said in my talk that it was “generally accepted” that 1.2 Kelvin of global warming will be likely to occur in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, where there are no feedbacks or the feedbacks are net-zero.

The relevant slide shows how the IPCC calculates this 1.2 K. One multiplies the IPCC’s radiative forcing from a doubling of CO2 (5.35 ln 2 = 3.71 W/m2: Myhre et al., 1998) by the Planck climate-sensitivity parameter (0.31 K/W/m2: IPCC, 2007, p. 631 fn.), and increases the result by approximately one-sixth to allow for latitudinal variations in temperature at the characteristic-emission altitude. It is worth noting that neither of the two relevant quantities can be measured directly. Both are guesses, and both may be exaggerations.

Professor Chris Essex of the University of Western Ontario performed some of the earliest spectral-line-by-spectral-line calculations to determine the form of the CO2 radiative forcing. Though he is willing to confirm that the the equation is indeed logarithmic, so that each additional molecule of CO2 has less forcing effect than its predecessors, he is less sure about the coefficient, which the IPCC has already reduced by 15% (it was 6.3 in the 1990 and 1995 reports). The coefficient, and hence the CO2 radiative forcing, may still be too high, and perhaps substantially so.

There is also doubt about the value of the Planck climate-sensitivity parameter, which also cannot be measured but is crucial because not only the original warming caused by CO2 before feedbacks but also, separately, the feedbacks themselves are dependent upon it. The Moon, which has no atmosphere, is a helpful benchmark, because the mean surface temperature is also the emission temperature. Theory (see NASA’s lunar fact-sheet, for instance) gives 271 K as the mean lunar surface temperature. However, the Diviner mission has established that at the lunar equator, the warmest part of the surface, the mean temperature is just 206 K. This implies that the mean temperature of the entire lunar surface is 193-194 K, a long way below the 271 K given by the use of the Stefan-Boltzmann equation (assuming albedo 0.11 and emissivity 1). If the Earth’s true emission temperature (which occurs somewhere at altitude in the troposphere) is less than the 255 K predicted by theory (assuming an albedo 0.306), then the Planck parameter may well be considerably less than the IPCC’s value, in which event on this ground alone climate sensitivity may be well below its central estimate of 3.26 K per CO2 doubling.

For the sake of brevity, I took the “official” values of the CO2 radiative forcing and of the Planck parameter as correct, and pointed out to the audience that the major debate between the skeptics and the believers centers on the overall feedback gain factor, which – in the IPCC’s implicit central estimate – is 2.81, almost tripling the warming that a CO2 doubling causes before feedbacks are taken into account. It is not possible to measure any individual temperature feedback directly, so the feedback multiplier is based on a (probably exaggerated) guess as to the value of the Planck parameter and (near-certainly very much exaggerated) guesses as to the values of the various temperature feedbacks.

My best estimates (guesses, but perhaps better guesses than those of the IPCC because I have no vested interest in the answers) are that the IPCC exaggerates the CO2 radiative forcing (which cannot be measured) by around 20%; that it exaggerates the Planck parameter (which cannot be measured) by 20%; and that it exaggerates the sum of all unamplified feedbacks (which cannot be measured) threefold, because, as Lindzen and Choi (2009,, 2011) and Spencer and Braswell (2010, 2011) have demonstrated, feedbacks are somewhat net-negative.

If my best guesses are indeed better than those of the IPCC, then climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 concentration is 0.8 K before feedbacks are taken into account and 0.7 K after feedbacks, very much in line with the results of Lindzen & Choi and Spencer & Braswell.

Even if the IPCC is right, it is still cheaper and more cost-effective to spend not a single red cent on global warming for at least 50 years (Nordhaus, 2012) than to take any action today to try to make global warming go away. Given that none of the three parameters whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured, it ought to be self-evident that the value of their product cannot be definitively determined, from which it follows that “the science” cannot possibly be “settled”.

Another commenter has asked why I insist on the use of reason in science and then admit that I believe in a Creator. Many leading scientists, including Professor Antonino Zichichi (president of the World Federation of Scientists) and Lord Kelvin (for whom the scale of absolute temperature is named) have been believers in Christianity. Thanks to Max Planck, it is now demonstrated that the laws of physics did not come into being until a fraction of a nanosecond after the Big Bang, from which it follows that no amount of ingenuity on our part can reveal to us what (or Who) said “Let there be light” and blazed the Universe into glorious existence.

In short, it is scientifically and rigorously proven that the assertion of Christianity that there is a Creator cannot be disproved (and, by the same token, that it cannot be proved either). Therefore, it is permissible for me to say I believe in the truths of the Christian faith, though it would be impermissible for me to say I could prove them to be true. On the other hand, many of the beliefs of the climate extremists can be demonstrated to be false. Their belief system, therefore, is appropriately classified not as a religion (which can neither be proved nor disproved) but as a superstition (which can be and has been disproved).

Finally, one or two commenters have expressed annoyance that I am willing to concede that there is such a thing as the greenhouse effect at all. The reason why I have always conceded this fact is that it is indeed a fact, established by an elegant, readily-replicable and oft-replicated experiment first conducted by an ancestor of one of the commenters here.

The true scientific debate does not center on whether there is a greenhouse effect (there is: get used to it), but on how much warming our enhancement of that effect may cause. My best guess is, “not a lot”. If we expect the climate extremists to be truthful, we ought to do our best to be truthful ourselves, and not to push the scientific argument beyond what measurement and experiment and the application of established theory to the results has plainly and sufficiently demonstrated.

“Certainly on the right lines. but Lord Monckton is not correct to claim that the theory of GHG’s is settled science. That is why it is still a theory. ……”

John, it isn’t a theory at all. It is still just a hypothesis. A hypothesis becomes a theory when the hypothesis is proven.

Here is an exercise in futility. Try to get the “consensus” crowd to agree what the null hypothesis is.

Here is another futile exercise: try to get the “consensus” crowd to show how the hypothesis of a 3 degree rise in global temperatures due primarily to increases in CO2 concentrations with “feedbacks”.

IF this was a theory, then the theory could be used to predict an outcome due to the increase in concentration of CO2. Which brings one to the next futile exercise: try to get the “consensus” crowd to make a prediction. The “consensus” crowd will only provide “projections” from their models, not predictions. (is that a self declaration that they don’t have a theory at all?) The reason for no predictions is that predictions can be proven wrong. According to the “consensus” crowd, projections are never wrong (but I am waiting for the screams of victory should their projections ever become true.)

Bottom line, there is no accepted theory of AGW by CO2 emissions. It is only a hypothesis.

This lecture and its affect underscores how thin is the knowledge on the subject of climate among the academic crowd and how reliant they are on the gregarious “love-in” substitute for scholarship. If Lord Monckton can get to enough colleges and universities, he could singlehandedly wipe out the fluffy edifice supporting the post normal science of climate (change?-this is redundant). Can you imagine the tenuous climate now in a Schenectady lecture room today? I guess the professors have recourse to bringing in the “Rapid Response Team” of gregarious “love-in” substitutes for scholarship.

I wish I hadn’t read that article. I found it depressing too. Kids are smart. I fear that a generation are going to lose faith in our society and its institutions as these kids grow up and discover, as they eventually must, that a large component of their education was in fact complete rubbish. And those authority figures entrusted with that education knew they were teaching complete rubbish or didn’t have the intellectual pills* to call their peers out. Once reason is dead nothing is possible, or impossible. As Lord Monckton might say; cineri gloria sera venit.

No doubt Lord Monckton has put together and memorised masses of information such as is demonstrated here. But I find it sad that he has not yet really listened to those who could explain the science better to him….
_____________________________________________
Do not let this “Monckton-lite” writeup fool you. Monckton is brilliant and he KNOWS the science backwards and forwards. He has not just ” memorised masses of information” what he has is a very deep knowledge of his subject and THAT is why no Warmist dares debate him.

What is the rest of his itinerary. He is heading North; might he be in Ottawa?

Can’t help you, but I’ve often wondered where he is going to be next and e.g. whether he will ever come to Scotland. Unfortunately, he doesn’t have a website .. which given that he’s self funded is understandable, because it is a lot of work.

However, perhaps it is time that a group formed to put together an unofficial “Lord Monckton” fan club website to promote the noble lord in a way that he seems reluctant to do himself?

Sarah J says:
March 10, 2012 at 4:34 am
If the guy who wrote that is meant to be a journalist he should be ashamed … Hideous bias, and maligning of those whose point of view he doesn’t agree with. My mind feels dirty just having read it.

O poor Sarah. Brew yourself a cup of tea and find a good book on scientific principles. Eventually you may get it.

Thank you for your presentation. I thoroughly enjoyed the read. You did a good job of filtering out most of Lord Monkton’s pompous pedantry. While I generally agree with most of what he says I cannot bear watching him in action. My loss.

What is to recognize in this ‘life script’ of this ‘Monumental film’ more and more, is that the generated problems of the climate science community (but also the natural science community in total) are generated from ignorance about the basics of philosophy especially logic, as Lord Monckton’s Schenectady showdown is an example. I think this is a ‘hallo’ to the data overloaded climate scientist’s from an alien like philosopher, asking basic questions, but the scientist’s are still busy in sophistication to win, or save the world like Bruce Willis. Unfortunately there comes up again this sophistication by moving idols on a stage, saying ‘You are our all new dictator, there is consensus’. This is clever, but do not fix the initial problem.

There is no philosophical reason that each scientist is able to argue without the fallacies Aristotle, student of Plato, has teached. Moreover, if a person is not educated in fallacies, he or she cannot be a scientist, because the science of philosophy is the basis of science.

There is web site where handicapped climate scientist’s and in consensus captured individuals can learn to recognize fallacies.

Somebody has said, ‘What relevant is, is the teaching; who the teacher is, is not relevant.’

And I think, if we have respect to Lord Monkton, it is because of his sayings and arguments. We cannot make Lord Monckton to our own, but we can make as true recognized sayings and arguments to our own. Maybe this would be ‘The climate freedom’ he was talking about.

YAWN. Polistra, If my head of state, Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II came to the US, would you insist on her being called Mrs Windsor? And, as we in the UK do not yet have a republic, the title of President is foreign to us: shall we therefore dis Obama when he comes here?

Christopher Monckton is a bone-fide hereditary Peer of the Realm (or as the rambling student who announced him in the poor video called him: ‘Vis Count’ (as opposed to ‘Vy Count’ – which doesn’t say a lot for basic American education). As such, especially in the Land of the Free, where I have had many a courteous welcome, he is entitled to as much courtesy to his rank and tile as you would be to be called Mister – or whatever other title you possessed.

Excellent write-up- thanks! A reminder of why the warmists run from debate like Superman avoids Kryponite. Normally I don’t read all the way through such long essays, but this one reads like a thriller.

More like vampires recoiling from Garlic (or perhaps a mirror makes a more apt analogy…).

I do wish Monckton had pushed back a little stronger on the notion that carbon dioxide amplified warming that was already occurring.

He is certainly better informed on the subject than I am, but that notion seems to be almost complete speculation based on what CO2 “should” do (with positive feedbacks) rather than what it actually does in the real world.

This was a wonderful opportunity for students to get a real sense of what advanced learning is really about.Lord Monckton, sternly but sadly, told those who had raised their hands: “You know, from the plain and clear demonstration that I gave during my lecture, that the IPCC’s statistical abuse was just that – an abuse. Yet, perhaps out of misplaced loyalty to your professor, you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”This is the true message of the lecture and counterpoint, and this lecture might just be the most valuable hour or two the kids will ever spend at school. Would more students old enough to understand it, hear that message.

RE: There is no debate about global warming, they announced. There is a consensus.

I find it amazing that normal rational people use this to shut down their brain and not consider the possibility of new input showing their assumptions to be wrong.

Currently 20 years of data shows that the feedback to be around “0.5” and not “3.0” as suggested by the alarmists. One can make a case that in the long term we may see a greater rise, BUT until the data appears showing that, it’s just wishful thinking.

Your comment is correct. Converting food to biofuel is enriching those companies and individuals who receive subsidizes for the practice. Converting food to biofuel results in a net increase in carbon emissions if unbiased energy accounting is done.

The current EU mandated 20% of transportation fuel from biofuels would if it was applied to all countries of the world require all of the available agricultural land if grain or corn based feedstock is used. In 2007 26% of the US corn production has diverted to create biofuel with a 7% net increase in carbon dioxide emitted if one includes the energy cost for fertilizer, to harvest the corn, to haul the corn to the biofuel plants, and to triple distil the ethanol.

As there is a limited amount of agricultural land on the planet and 7 billion people to feed, converting food to biofuel will unquestionably result in massive increases in the cost of food. As Western countries have sufficient funds to avoid starvation, starvation and malnutrition will likely be limited to the third world countries.

I see there is no discussion of the food to biofuel crisis at RealClimate.

If one yells fire, fire, fire!!! in a theater with the comment that it is better to be safe than sorry and the science is settle, you would be arrested and taken for psychological evaluation. If you continued to yell fire, fire, fire!!! in theaters you would be imprisoned or institutionalized.

The extreme AGW issue is a mania, the madness of crowds. Science is on the side of the so called “skeptics” or “deniers”. The science indicates warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will result in less of than 1C of warming with most of the warming occurring at higher latitudes where it will be result in an expansion of the biosphere.

CO2 is not a poison. Plants eat CO2. Commercial greenhouses inject CO2 into the greenhouse to reduce growing times and increase yield. Cereal crop yields for example increase from 30% to 40% if atmospheric CO2 is doubled.

Those promoting biofuels plead using cellulose feedstocks rather than grain or corn based feedstocks, however, the pilot projects to convert cellulose feedstocks to biofuel require multiple technical breakthroughs which may not be possible. It is interesting that major companies are abandoning the cellulose to biofuel research.

On the Observational Determination of Climate Sensitivity and Its Implications by Lindzen and Choi 2011
We estimate climate sensitivity from observations, using the deseasonalized fluctuations in sea surface temperatures (SSTs) and the concurrent fluctuations in the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) outgoing radiation from the ERBE (1985-1999) and CERES (2000-2008) satellite instruments. Distinct periods of warming and cooling in the SSTs were used to evaluate feedbacks. …The present paper is an expansion of the earlier paper where the various criticisms are taken into account……We demonstrate that our new method does moderately well in distinguishing positive from negative feedbacks and in quantifying negative feedbacks. In contrast, we show that simple regression methods used by several existing papers generally exaggerate positive feedbacks and even show positive feedbacks when actual feedbacks are negative. We argue that feedbacks are largely concentrated in the tropics, and the tropical feedbacks can be adjusted to account for their impact on the globe as a whole. Indeed, we show that including all CERES data (not just from the tropics) leads to results similar to what are obtained for the tropics alone – though with more noise. We again find that the outgoing radiation resulting from SST fluctuations exceeds the zerofeedback response thus implying negative feedback. In contrast to this, the calculated TOA outgoing radiation fluxes from 11 atmospheric models forced by the observed SST are less than the zerofeedback response, consistent with the positive feedbacks that characterize these models. The results imply that the models are exaggerating climate sensitivity. ….

The False Promise of Biofuels
Despite extensive research, biofuels are still not commercially competitive. The breakthroughs needed, revealed by recent science, may be tougher to realize than previously thought.

Corn ethanol is widely produced because of subsidies, and it diverts massive tracts of farmland needed for food. Converting the cellulose in cornstalks, grasses and trees into biofuels is proving difficult and expensive. Algae that produce oils have not been grown at scale. And more advanced genetics are needed to successfully engineer synthetic micro­organisms that excrete hydrocarbons.

Some start-up companies are abandoning biofuels and are instead using the same processes to make higher-margin chemicals for products such as plastics or cosmetics.

“But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended”
This is totally untrue – it is doing exactly what its proponents intended, it is making them and their friends richer. There was never any intent for any impact on ‘global warming’ although there may be some ‘useful idiots’ who may have believed so. Like all ‘green power’ and associated activities it is a money laundering scheme to pass taxpayers’ money to politically favored groups and individuals. Money is also made in administering these schemes by the friends of those in power; that is why the multinational banks are so keen and always involved.

William Astley says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:56 am
——snip—-

The Clean Energy Scam
The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite….

Biofuels ‘crime against humanity’
Massive production of biofuels is “a crime against humanity” because of its impact on global food prices, a UN official has told German radio. “Producing biofuels today is a crime against humanity,” UN Special Rapporteur for the Right to Food Jean Ziegler told Bayerischer Runfunk radio. Many observers have warned that using arable land to produce crops for biofuels has reduced surfaces available to grow food. Mr Ziegler called on the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to change its policies on agricultural subsidies and to stop supporting only programs aimed at debt reduction. He says agriculture should also be subsidised in regions where it ensures the survival of local populations. Meanwhile, in response to a call by the IMF and World Bank over the weekend to a food crisis that is stoking violence and political instability, German Foreign Minister Peer Steinbrueck gave his tacit backing.

Prime Indonesian jungle to be cleared for palm oil
Their former hero recently gave a palm oil company a permit to develop land in one of the few places on earth where orangutans, tigers and bears still can be found living side-by-side — violating Indonesia’s new moratorium on concessions in primary forests and peatlands.

Bravo! I think the part that really chokes me up is that it seems possible that Lord Monckton may have reached some of these kids, at least to the extent of making them realize that there is more to the truth than one hears in a comfortable, stagnant bubble of like opinion. I blush to admit that I didn’t believe that was possible – that anyone, no matter how courageous, intelligent, or well prepared, could possibly break through the barrier and let in the sunshine and air on CAGW home turf – a university group with a hostile professor. Makes me ashamed of my cynicism and gives me hope for us all.
Well done, sir. Thank you.

I am happy that you have chosen to visit America Monckton of Brenchley to carry your continued fight in promoting rational science discourse.

I hope you can find time in the future for a trip to the Pacific Northwest to deliver your presentation to those badly in need of rational thinking on the subject.Seattle is a good place to consider because it is a nest of feel good weenie environmentalism without any critical thinking behind it.It is also home to the University of Washington where prominent AGW believers are in residence.

People are in desperate need for a cold rational conversation that is forbidden in so many colleges these days.Not allowing for freedom to think for themselves and having to put up with conformity by threats.

Hopefully you have freed many from the prison of conformity and consensus and have begun to learn to examine the evidence critically and skeptically.

As for the video, it was difficult to follow because of the poor quality but I get the sense that everyone who attended came away numb from the experience. Now granted, the majority probably still have the “don’t confuse me with facts” perspective. But somehow I get the feeling that there were many who had their eyes opened.

No, you know what? I missed it in my previous post. That wasn’t the important point for me, now that I really think about it.
It’s about integrity. It’s so basic, so vital and absolutely crucial to science. Heck, it’s crucial to all productive human endeavors. At the same time, it’s so grotesquely lacking in many leading figures in this debate. In a world where Gleick is hailed by many as a hero for fraud and fabrication, where philosophers who specialize in ethics tell us in his defense that the end justifies the means, where climategate emails that illustrate corrupt practices and subversion are dismissed as normal and acceptable — to hear that Monckton had the integrity, courage, and dedication to say ‘you raised your hands in denial of the truth. Never do that again’ and be heard and understood… it seems like magic out of some fairy tale. I keep thinking to myself, ‘Really? That really happened?’.
Sorry for the multiple posts, I’ll try to think twice and type once next time.

….As a side note, everytime I come to WUWT to look at one of the reference pages, I get sidetracked by yet another great article. If I asked God to bless Lord Monckton, then I must also ask him to do so for Anthony Watts!

Hi Joe!
I agree with your comments:

1. The warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 will be less than 1C.
2. The planet is about to cool which will be the final nail in the coffin of the extreme AGW paradigm.
3. This is a great site and a very important issue.
4. I also would also like to deeply thank Anthony Watts and Lord Monckton for their efforts to initiate logical, scientific, unbiased discussion of this issue. Hopeful logic and reason will prevail, ending this mania.

Trillions of dollars are being proposed to be spent on boondoggle schemes which will not significantly lower carbon dioxide emissions. Western governments are on the verge of bankruptcy due to high government spending. i.e. Spending trillions of dollars on boondoggle schemes is not better safe than sorry, regardless of one’s political affiliation.

Best wishes,
William

Comment:
The final nail in the coffin of the extreme AGW movement will be unequivocal planetary cooling. The unresolved scientific issue is how fast and how much the planet will cool and the mechanisms.

Brian Johnson uk says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator?

Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?
_____________________________________

Perhaps you ought to read the context of the only thing you disagree with in Justin Pulliam’s article about Christopher Monckton’s presentation to a group of University students.

He was talking about you, apparently.

“The following morning, as we drove through the snowy landscape of upstate New York towards the next venue the following morning, I asked Lord Monckton what he had thought of the strange conduct of the professor, particularly when he had abused his authority by asking his students to assent to the correctness of a statistical technique that he and they had known to be plainly false.

Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.””

I love these old school pioneers of science and I’ve read a lot of Tyndall’s papers and have yet to see where he says IR radiation adds heat energy to the bottom of a container when convection is unconstrained.

Tyndall probably considered how energy would propagate in the absence of gravity.

What is the nature of these easily replicable experiments?

I didn’t see any reference to “easily replicable experiments” in the article. A good hypothesis or theory is constructed using logical steps. They are validated or falsified using experiments.

They really prove the concept of heating via “back radiation”?

Have you ever put a thermometer near a bar heater without a reflector and then added a reflector behind it?

Do you think the manufacturer of your bar heater put a reflector there to improve its aesthetics?

William Astley says:
March 10, 2012 at 8:52 am
“Comment:
The final nail in the coffin of the extreme AGW movement will be unequivocal planetary cooling. The unresolved scientific issue is how fast and how much the planet will cool and the mechanisms.”

Monckton comment is at the heart of the problem:
“We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”

Western civilization is under attack from within to destroy its core values and only those values can save it. The destruction of individual thought and worth in favor of the approved thought and worth in the universities is in opposition to their purpose for existence.

Translation: professors demanding brown nosing and students expecting better grades for brown nosing cannot expect to make a contribution to science other than by a consensus.

Lord Monckton’s reply was moving. Gently, and sadly, he said, “We shall lose the West unless we can restore the use of reason to pre-eminence in our institutions of what was once learning. It was the age of reason that built the West and made it prosperous and free. The age of reason gave you your great Constitution of liberty. It is the power of reason, the second of the three great powers of the soul in Christian theology, that marks our species out from the rest of the visible creation, and makes us closest to the image and likeness of our Creator. I cannot stand by and let the forces of darkness drive us unprotesting into a new Dark Age.”

To Lord Monckton…. In the best spirit of co-operation can we agree that the so called Greenhouse effect is more like a think flimsy piece of clothing effect, one that one is more likely to see, ah lets say , at VIctoria’s Secret ( a misnomer, since with virtually nothing covered up, there are very few “secrets) than at an a greenhouse that is truly trapping heat. My point is that perhaps the Victoria Secret veil so to speak is wonderfully constructed in a way that makes one marvel at the creative powers at whoever designed all this so as life on the planet can exist, but given the properties of co2, and its minute amount, it is impossible for it to be the regulator of temperature. After all since it heats and cools faster, has different specific gravity, is unevenly mixed and not even in the areas where most of mans contribution from it is ( see article I referenced, and the nasa pic of this) so how can it really be involved at all?

One has to marvel though at the creators handiwork in designing this atmospheric negligee to enhance mother nature. One of the problems is that people hear Greenhouse effect and think of a pane of glass that will smother us. If we think of it my way, then we see it for what it really is.. a thing of beauty.

I bet alot of you out there didn’t know I had such a sensitive side. Its the Italian painter in me coming out..ha ha

“I’ve often wondered where he is going to be next and e.g. whether he will ever come to Scotland.”

He is often in Scotland because he lives there. And he has spoken there; for example, here is my account of a debate on the motion ‘’“This House Believes Global Warming is a Global Crisis” where he and I (with Niils Axel Morner) were on the same side St Andrews Uni.

My only quibble is the sub-title “Greens too yellow….” is entirely inappropriate and misleading. I would replace it with something more in tune with the final three paragraphs:In Science, it is truth that matters, not appeasing local authority. Reason for yourself!

Brilliant was Monckton’s introduction of how past episodes of consensus have lead to great evil and tragedy. At the end, when admonishing those that “raised your hands in denial of the truth,” he should have come full circle to remind them that uncritical belief in authority and consensus has caused the death of over 100 million people.

Other than that, send this piece to the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal.

Lord Monckton, if you read me, please return here for a link to my paper which will be available within 72 hours.

Doug,
Please stop telling us that you have a paper coming out while not discussing the technical details. You come across as a know-it-all blow-hard with knowledge from on high that has been denied to those of us who are merely mortal. If you really have something to say, then say it or be quiet! But anyhow, please stop the incessant advertising! /rant

What impresses me most about Monckton is that he chooses to use his considerable gifts in rhetoric and critical thinking to defend science. His evisceration of “consensus thinking” was devastating and credible, even to the closed-minded audience.

I nominate Lord Monckton for the Nobel. He is doing more for scientific awareness than any other current recipient, to date. He is a master, and we are so fortunate to have him. There really should be some sort of award… He makes “consensus scientists” look like kindergarten fools, which they truly are. GK

Monckton is doing the world a real service by re-introducing the argument of reason vs religion to the climate debate.
That debate is what got the mediaeval Christian world out of its thrall to religious dogma and into the enlightenment, with much pain for people brave enough to lead the debate.

______________________________________

I think a lot more pain was dealt out by those believing in the dogmas of the anti-religious movements of Marxist Communism and National socialism.

Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive and never have been.

One could argue that it was the inheritance and concentration of wealth from relatives killed by successive plagues that elevated sufficient numbers of citizens to jump start the enlightenment.

Perhaps your personal views on religion are affecting your ability to apply reason on the subject.

I have heard it said (though not on this blog) that a religious scientist can more easily differentiate between that which they believe based on faith, and that which they believe based upon scientific endeavors. “That religion & Philosophy are to be preserved distinct. We are not to introduce divine revelations into Philosophy, nor philosophical opinions into religion.” That quote is from Seven Statements on Religion, Sir Isaac Newton, post-1710. I believe that Lord Monckton follows Newton’s philosophy on this matter.

In his presentation Lord Monckton has shown a graph (and a part of it) related to the Atlantic hurricanes, which appear to be based on the NOAA’s Accumulated Cyclone Energy or ‘ACE’ for short:

Some time ago I noticed that this graph can be represented by a natural variable measured since 1860’s and known to the scientists as an important climate parameter since 1950’s, when delayed by about 15 years. This delay than can be used to make an estimate of the future hurricane activity http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/AHA.htm
which I mentioned in a post on the Dr. Judith Curry’s blog.
She has done number of papers on hurricanes, confirming that in her view the outlook is about right. Subsequently we discussed (via emails) details and possible mechanism and her verdict is: “the 15 year lag is the main challenge here, but you have a plausible explanation”.
I might write short article, but peer review is out of question for the obvious reasons.
If a scientist from The Global Warming Policy Foundation would like (on behalf of Lord Monckton) to take a closer look at my findings, I shall be more than glad to forward all relevant details.

I keep seeing comments throughout this thread and many others, accusing the team of cowardice in their no debate stance. They may be wrong and they may be cowards but they are not fools. A fair debate on a national stage by principals of both sides would imply the science is not settled. It is not going to happen as much as we might wish it. Unfortunatly, time is the only thing that will settle the issue. Hopefully, proposed mitigation can be delayed long enough to minimize damage to the economy.

Toto says “The Debate of the Century would be Gore vs Monckton. Too bad Gore would never do it.”

I agree Toto. On the other hand Dr. Gleick might be up to the challenge. I have suggested, to my local paper, that they support an effort to have Lord Monckton give his “Climate of Freedom” talk out here in Northern California (Folsom Lake College). At the conclusion of the talk an hour or two debate with Dr. Gleick would be interesting

Back-radiation violates the second law of thermodynamics. There is no way round that fact.

Henry says:
Back radiation, also called re-radiation, happens all the time.
It has to do with light of different wavelengths (frequencies) that always moves in straight lines and stuff, hitting certain obstacles on their ways,
it has nothing to do with thermodynamics

Lord Monckton,
On the outside chance that you are still following this thread or might return later, I thought I would take this opportunity to seek your (or anyone else’s) help. I know that you follow Lindzen’s work closely and often cite him. In his House of Commons presentation, toward the end, he gives a sketch of an alternative derivation of the “Climate Sensitivity” based on observed rates of evaporation increase per change in sea surface temperature, and this based on data from the 2007 paper by Wentz et. al., “How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring?” Lindzen seemed to run out of time and the accompanying slides are, well, “sketchy.” There is a slightly expanded set of slides on this same alternative derivation that accompanied his presentation to the American Chemical Society in August, 2011. Unfortunately, even the latter was still a bit too short for me to follow. Do you know whether Lindzen has written a detailed version of this or whether he was relying on some paper(s) on it already published or otherwise available?
When I first read the Wentz paper shortly after it came out, it struck me that it was a very important piece of work. Even its authors say at the end that their data had “profound implications” for global warming. If I recall correctly, they did not apply their results to any such derivation of the climate sensitivity. Thank you in advance for any help you might be able to provide.

Excellent article Justin, and yes, I was almost spellbound through the entire article. In an age where I have to reread repeatedly so many rambling sentences to try and figure out what the author is trying to convey; I didn’t have to reread a single sentence in yours. A very real pleasure.

Lord Monckton: A solid sound debate decidedly in your favor. I wish I could apologize for your audience being so full of sheep with blinders and nose rings, only it is too common in today’s universities. You did strike a chord in that audience though. Instead of shrilling, “Chant with me”, you spoke to the students and shamed them for not thinking on their own. That difference in approach and message marks a very distinct difference from the CAGW warmists. May your spark of reason grow to the light of true science in all of those students.

As all too often; the irrational trolls jump into the thread in force. Paid by the word or blindly spewing faith, their messages are all the same. Defame. Deflect. Diminish. Demonize. Doubt. Despair. Drown out. Detain. Shame they avoid real debates so can’t have debate as a descriptive. Since most of their “science” in not replicable in full they can’t use definite either. Desperate and Despicable fit very well though!

Presumably everybody agrees someTHING created the Universe, and the debate is if it’s been someONE? I am always impressed by some atheists’ resolution in not conceding this trivial point.

This is why I call myself an Agnostic. I claim that Atheism and Theism take equal amounts of faith!

The writers of the US Declaration of Independence were very smart by using the term “Creator.” They did not use God, Christ, Allah, etc. They used “Creator,” for the sole purpose of acknowledging that SOMETHING created us, whilst at the same time not endorsing a single religion. However, they then jumped the shark by “arbitrarily” assigning the inalienable rights to that “thing.” They can be excused for this however, for they were trying to show that SOME rights MUST supersede man-made laws (and thus can’t be taken away); that some laws are beyond reproach. Otherwise, ALL laws are “permissions” granted and taken away by/from one man to/from another. (and we all know this is how it really is, in spite of the decree)

@David L says:
March 10, 2012 at 3:32 am
Yep, we used to say ” Them that can, do. Them that can’t, teach.” Real, productive, innovative work is difficult. Regurgitating the barely grasped work of others is not so difficult.
That poor young woman who confronted Monckton will probably never fully recover her self-respect. For likely the first time in her life she encountered a classically educated man with an excellent mind and facts at his disposal. These specimens are very rare today and most of them are “doing” not “teaching”. We are fortunate indeed that Monckton is afoot, slaying the dragons of ignorance.
Nice job, Mr Pulliam.

Leigh B.Kelly wants to know:
How Much More Rain Will Global Warming Bring?

Henry@Leigh

Well, note that I found that the global warming is not “global”
and that it is due largely to natural factors, i.e. more sunshine and or less clouds and/or less ozone, etc.
including a quite a bit more greenery which also traps some heat.
According to my sample of weather stations all around the world,

I estimate that rainfall increased globally by about 1.5 mm/month/decade during the past 40 years.
In other words, on average you got about 6 mm per month more rain in your backyard than you had 40n years ago.
I think that is good for life?
I think that is OK.

First, thank you, Justin Pulliam, for an excellent report, and thank you, Lord Monckton, for your tireless defense of science and reason. I agree with other commenters that the take-away quote is “Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”

In other business,

Will says (March 10, 2012 at 9:28 am): “Back-radiation violates the second law of thermodynamics. There is no way round that fact.”

As this view contradicts the overwhelming scientific “consensus”, on both sides of the CAGW issue, experimental proof would revolutionize science and snag a Nobel Prize, at least. Yet AFAIK, nobody–not Claes Johnson, not Pierre LaTour, not Doug Cotton, not Will–has reported such an experiment, despite the fame, adulation, money, and nubile groupies that would reward publication. So where’s the beef, Will (to coin a phrase)? :-)

Beautifully written Justin and brilliantly stated Lord Monckton, if your journey takes you to Boston, stop by MIT and look up Dr. Nocera. His approach to the energy problem, research funded by the US DOE, is an eye opener; Personalized Energy.

“What about the methane from cattle? Should we give up eating meat to Save The Planet? The professor thought so. Lord Monckton, as always, had the data to hand. In the past decade, he said, methane concentration had risen by just 20 parts per billion, which might cause 1/350 C° of warming. This was too little to matter. Leave the cows alone.”

An additional piece of information is also helpful here. Prior to settlement by Europeans, the North American Great Plains was the home of tens of millions of bison. If the amount of bison flesh is roughly calculated and compared to the amount of cattle flesh, we find that today we are with a factor of two or three of being roughly the same. Given the similarities between the two animals in their diets and digestion, the Great Plains has had a certain level of methane emissions for tens of thousands of years.

No doubt these talks are not intended to be lectures, and a lot of details are left out. Can we really get overall 80% energy efficiency from sunlight end-to-end? And, if so, is it really scalable when you consider things like transmission losses and effects of aging on the apparatus?

With all due respect to Dr. Nocera, I’ve seen dozens of similar promises made by respectable researchers over the years, but some practical limiting factor always emerged somewhere along the path. I think I will wait until the concept is implemented and proven on a wide scale before getting too excited.

Lord Monckton, please accept my humble thanks for your continuing effort to return science to its proper place.
With out a return to the basic principles of reasoning, sound logic, and a solid methodical effort to look at the data and form conclusions based on them, an entire generation will be lost to manipulation by con men and fools.

It is sad that many of those students may have for the first time been exposed to a proper presentation of the known facts in the climate debate and more importantly a proper respect for and examination of the limits of how certain we are about those suppositions that CAGW dogma is based on.

Most specifically, I thank you for challenging them to think about their vote to support the professor.

“… Never do that again, even for the sake of appeasing authority. In science, whatever you may personally believe or wish to be so, it is the truth and only the truth that matters.”

There is no lesson that is quite as indelible as that sort of gentle reprimand and admonition in public to stand up for the facts as you see them and not to just merge into the crowd and mimic the behavior of others in the group. Crowd consensus is only a very short step away from totalitarian thought control, and the passions of the mob. Students need to learn that at least some adults welcome and even insist that they come to their own conclusions based on the facts as they see them.

When I was on my high school debate team, we used to pen short axioms that we would put on our materials to help us avoid common logical errors. My choice was :

“Never blame an idea for its source!” (even idiots have good ideas).

This helped me avoid falling for appeals to authority in argumentation, by remembering that the source of the concept was irrelevant, only the validity of the concepts mattered. The obvious inverse is also true:

“Never trust an assertion due to its source!” (even geniuses make mistakes)

Will says: March 10, 2012 at 9:28 am
Back-radiation violates the second law of thermodynamics. There is no way round that fact.

That reminds me – I must throw out my microwave oven, since it violates the second law of thermodynamics, it being impossible for microwaves from a cold cavity magnetron to make a hot liquid even hotter. Or something.

And, if so, is it really scalable when you consider things like transmission losses and effects of aging on the apparatus?
============
Excellent point about transmission but his approach is point of use. Instead of building a grid in the non-legacy world, he’s proposing a solution that’s self sufficient for energy and potable water etc. It also makes sense for the legacy world in relation to conservation of resources and decreased pollution. The grid will be with us for quite some time but those who live in sunny locations, note the reliance on solar, or partially sunny with grid input, would be able to generate and store a fuel source that’s only used when its needed.

Regarding aging of the apparatus. His point is make it cheaply with the idea that its easy to maintain and replace. The fuel cell is the one sticking point to the idea but with has production should come down in price.

Its very cleaver and I like the holistic approach which is largely lacking from current energy solutions. Designing the approach with the end user in mind is also refreshing.

And, if so, is it really scalable when you consider things like transmission losses and effects of aging on the apparatus?
============
I think I see your point about the 80% claim in a point of use system. Sorry, I was looking at it from the perspective of the waste associated with the current US grid.

From what I’ve read, Fuel cells run on nat gas are about 50% efficient and approach 80% if hot water generation is included using waste heat.

back-radiation is from a colder sky to a warmer surface.
Back-radiation violates the second law of thermodynamics. There is no way round that fact.

You are incorrect. And you (collective VOST [Violation Of Second-law-of Thermo] people) have been told so many times. It’s only because you don’t actually understand thermodynamics that you fail to take correction. You first of all have to recognize that you’re trying to compare apples with oranges and not realizing that radiation is not part of the study of colligitive properties (volume, temperature, pressure for example) which are what is the basic subject matter of thermodynamics. Radiation is emitted by molecules based on their individual (internal + kinetic) energy, not by the temperature of the body or volume of gas that molecule is a part of. (Though, of course there is a statistical relationship between the energy of individual molecules and the temperature.) But if we add a smallish number of IR-active molecules (CO2 in this case), then the amount of IR absorbed from the IR emitted at the surface will increase, and raise the gas temperature a smallish amount. Then the IR released by the IR active gasses (CO2, H2O, CH4, etc.) will increase proportionally to the increase in temperature and by the CO2 in particular in proportion to the amount of CO2 increase. And the half of that increase which heads to the surface will warm the surface a small amount. This is all the basic AGW theory is concerned with and is basically correct. The CAGW theory, adds several points which are incorrect, in particular that the amount of H2O vapor will be increased on net after feedbacks are considered. In fact the net feedback will almost certainly be negative. This is the position of the skeptics I consider reliable. Unfortunately VOST people confuse the issue, and since CAGW advocates like to attack weak points, also thus weaken the entire skeptic position. I’d like to invite a nice polite collegial discussion, but from a practical POV I have to say, “knock it off!”

I love it when people say things like “It’s not heating a warmer object, it’s slowing the cooling”. Have you ever seen a distribution of this “slowing”? What is the average rate of change with and without atmospheric CO2?

“Never do that again.” What a wonderful moment! How right he was. How I would love to hear what that professor said to his students next time they met in class.
I was a great lecture, and outstanding reporting.

Isn’t it interesing that a person with such a debated title and knowledge still just speaks for a short 40 minutes to allow for a 20 minute eternity of Q and A…withouth anyone having had their questions pre-screened-by-gore-mannian-standars?

I visit WUWT from time to time, sometimes interesting,sometimes not but this love-in is profoundly depressing. Would like to see Monkton in a public debate with someone like Michael Mann rather than a load of students. I’ve seen Monkton’
s exchanges with John Abraham, don’t think he’d step up to the plate and publicly debate a real scientist, live and in public.

“I visit WUWT from time to time, sometimes interesting,sometimes not but this love-in is profoundly depressing. Would like to see Monkton in a public debate with someone like Michael Mann…”

Oh, please, OH PLEASE, make it happen if you possibly can! Mann is far too cowardly to debate Lord Monckton. But if there is any way you could help arrange it [aside from kidnapping Mann at gunpoint and forcing him to debate], please do what you can to arrange it. If you need help, just say the word. I’ll do whatever I can to get the cowardly Michael Mann into a real debate with Lord Monckton.

Will says (March 10, 2012 at 9:28 am): “Back-radiation violates the second law of thermodynamics. There is no way round that fact.”

As this view contradicts the overwhelming scientific “consensus”, on both sides of the CAGW issue, experimental proof would revolutionize science and snag a Nobel Prize, at least. Yet AFAIK, nobody–not Claes Johnson, not Pierre LaTour, not Doug Cotton, not Will–has reported such an experiment, despite the fame, adulation, money, and nubile groupies that would reward publication. So where’s the beef, Will (to coin a phrase)? :-)

This is really odd, you ask for experimental proof from basic traditional science on this, which is grounded in empirical industrial knowledge, continuous proof in testing, yet you require only a thought experiment for a claim which contradicts the traditional teaching..

..surely you’re the one who should be providing experimental proof?

Seems Latour has managed to get Spencer to re-think his thought experiment..

“Dr. Spencer’s essay “Yes, Virginia, Cooler Objects Can Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still” (July 23, 2011), written to support the greenhouse gas effect (GHE) the science behind man-made global warming has sparked increased criticism since publication. Dr. Spencer, without question a leading researcher of great integrity, has since gone on record to concede that he may be wrong and being misled by an ‘assumption bias.’

It was apparent assumptions in Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” essay that inspired Dr. Latour, who first made a name for himself working on NASA’s Apollo Space program, to publish a counter-argument to Spencer’s essay entitled, “No Virginia, Cooler Objects Cannot Make Warmer Objects Even Warmer Still.” [1.]
…

“But Dr. Latour goes further in his criticism. Semi-retired after a stellar career, Latour is one of many eminent experts now becoming increasingly outspoken and declaring the GHE as “junk science.” His position was summarized in US Senate Reports. [2.& 3.]

Spencer’s article lends support to the discredited idea that cold CO2 [carbon dioxide] high in the atmosphere back-radiates to Earth’s warmer surface, heating it more and causing it to radiate to the atmosphere and space with higher intensity than it would without cold CO2 back-radiation. To Latour this contradicted all he saw in his branch of applied science, chemical engineering, and needed to be confronted head on. Engineers must ensure their theories are in harmony with the Second Law of thermodynamics: energy only flows from a hot source to a cold sink, not the other way around. If that law is violated, it can lead to the theory creating energy and driving global warming, a violation of the First Law conservation of energy. That would be a perpetual motion machine, impossible to build. It appears Dr Spencer and the UN IPCC succumbed to this fallacy at the start, as depicted in the famous 1997 Kiehl-Trenberth radiation flow diagram.”
..
“Spencer’s “Yes, Virginia” article now appears to be an incongruous and muddled defense of the ailing hypothesis creaking under a weight of consistently conflicting satellite data and ground measurements.”
..
“Always a stickler for thoroughness as a Chemical Process Control Systems Engineer, Latour had long worked at the sharp end of applied science. His special aptitude earned him his place in the Apollo Space program, where life and death decisions meant that when the theory contradicted reality you changed the theory. In 1997 he analysed the atmosphere as a chemical process system and proved any thermostat adjusting fossil fuel combustion was un-measurable, unobservable and uncontrollable; it would never work. Control systems engineers use these mathematical criteria, developed in 1970s, before embarking on building control systems. He finds engineering is denied involvement in UN IPCC, government and college research on AGW. Europe is paying dearly in 2011 for failing to check the engineering validity of CO2 Cap & Trade schemes.”

My bold. Why are the people who do understand the 2nd Law from practical experience denied involvement by the IPCC? Obvious isn’t it? Because as Latour says, it is junk science.

You can continue to defend it, but unless you prove it empirically then all you’re demanding we accept is a product of someone’s imagination which actually contradicts the 2nd Law in the real world.

Why don’t you take a look around at the industries we have?

Links to both Yes and No Virginia are on that page.

And then, y’all generic warmists not only demand we accept The Greenhouse Effect doesn’t break the 2nd Law, you don’t even have a consistent internally coherent agreement of what The Greenhouse Effect is!

So what is it? Is it Spencers perpetual motion or is it warm insulating blanket?

John West says:
March 10, 2012 at 11:55 am
Will says
“Back-radiation violates the second law of thermodynamics. There is no way round that fact.”

Silver Ralph says:
March 10, 2012 at 12:32 pm
Will says: March 10, 2012 at 9:28 am
Back-radiation violates the second law of thermodynamics. There is no way round that fact.
——————————————————————————————–And a blanket violates the law of a good night’s sleep … … not.

You can keep your violation, while I will stay to stay toasty and comfortable in this particular consensus….. ;-)

———–
What consensus when you don’t even agree on how the effect is achieved?!

That’s just ludicrous. You don’t have any real science!

And as for ‘warm insulating blanket of Carbon Dioxide’ – get real, just what sort of insulating blanket do you think you have keeping you toasty warm when it’s practically 100% hole? There is no insulating blanket, maybe if you’re the size of a microbe near it..

When you’ve worked out just what The Greenhouse Effect is you’re all so busy insisting we should give up rational thought to accept, do let us know.

I visit WUWT from time to time, sometimes interesting,sometimes not but this love-in is profoundly depressing. Would like to see Monkton in a public debate with someone like Michael Mann rather than a load of students.

*****

Hi, Jim, you must have missed this bit:

“Why, said a professor of environmental sciences in a rambling question apparently designed to prevent anyone else from getting a question in, had Lord Monckton not cited peer-reviewed sources? He had cited several, but he apologized that the IPCC – which he had cited frequently – was not a peer-reviewed source: indeed, fully one-third of the references its 2007 gospel had cited had not been peer-reviewed.

Why had Lord Monckton said that from 1695-1735 the temperature in central England had risen by 2.2 degrees (implying 0.55 degrees of warming per decade) when he had gone on to say that the warming rate per decade was 0.4 degrees? He explained that the warming rate was correctly calculated on the basis of the least-squares linear-regression trend, giving 0.39 degrees, which he had rounded for convenience.

Did Lord Monckton not accept that we could quantify the CO2 feedback? This point came from the professor. “Well,” replied Lord Monckton in one of his most crushing responses, “perhaps the professor can quantify it, but the IPCC can’t: its 2007 gospel gives an exceptionally wide range of answers, from 25 to 225 parts per million by volume per Kelvin – in short, they don’t know.

****

Cheer up, Jim, maybe if you read the entire article you wouldn’t be so depressed.

This is an example I would use in the future to demonstrate true genius. You need all the figures prepared, and to know how they all fit into the big picture and affect each other. Professionals can learn a narrow field in great detail but few can make the step to fitting it into the rest. That cannot be taught and as Monckton demonstrates can be done outside anyone’s field if they are able to do it. This lecture has hopefully been filmed, and shown to audiences of activists and students, chained to their seats if necessary and driven there in carts, and we could uproot the monster in weeks.

It occurs to me there is one more miraculous feature of atmospheric CO2 as imagined by purveyors of conventional wisdom: it heats up very quickly, but cools very slowly. I wonder how that works and if there are other examples of this kind of amazing asymmetry in nature.

BTW: I’m still patiently waiting for a link to the easily replicable Tyndall experiment that shows radiation overpowering convection to modulate the atmospheric lapse rate. I haven’t seen anything like this in the collected Tyndall papers.

Myrrh says (March 10, 2012 at 4:52 pm): “Seems Latour has managed to get Spencer to re-think his thought experiment..”

Eh? Myrrh, did you even read the references in your own reference? Dr. Spencer retracted nothing, and even added real-world examples of why LaTour is wrong. I respect(ed) O’Sullivan’s reputation, but he blew that one big time.

“This is really odd, you ask for experimental proof from basic traditional science on this…”

Nope. I’m asking for experimental proof of fringe science, which contradicts “basic traditional science” used by both sides of the CAGW issue.

“..surely you’re the one who should be providing experimental proof?”

Why? I have nothing to gain, nothing to prove. If LaTour, however, gets the results he expects from a real-life version of the “Yes Virginia” experiment, he not only gets a Nobel Prize, but he also gets to say, “Bazinga, Spencer!” I’m absolutely baffled that he hasn’t yet done so.

Myrrh, perhaps you could use your influence to persuade LaTour, Johnson, or Cotton to do the definitive experiment that should consign the IPCC to the dustbin of history? For the children? :-)

I … don’t think he’d step up to the plate and publicly debate a real scientist, live and in public.

Actually, he would mop the floor with Mann, Jones, Hansen, Suzuki or any other ‘real’ scientist you would care to name. Debaters don’t have to be on the ‘correct’ side of the argument to win the debate.

I have a standard lecture for my engineering students and it is this: “You will not win an argument with a lawyer. If you are so unfortunate as to end up being cross-examined, you should expect to be shredded, no matter how expert you are.” (the point of the lecture being that you should document your work properly) A couple of years ago I pointed out that I would lose any argument on any technical subject with Sarah Palin, no matter how little she knew about the subject.

Personally, I would love to see a smack down between Monckton and Gore or Suzuki. It would be very entertaining. The trouble is that some people would think they had been enlightened. They would be wrong. A debate is not about ‘truth’ or ‘facts’. A debate is about winning the debate.

I partially agree. But facts matter very much in scientific debates. Monckton is an expert at using facts to skewer opponents. However, if he didn’t have the facts on his side he would not do nearly as well. He would probably lose as many debates as he won, probably more. If global temperatures were clearly accelerating along with the rise in CO2 that would trump any debating skill.

This recalls the reason that Gavin Schmidt gave for losing his debate with Michael Crichton: Crichton was taller than Schmidt, so the audience voted Crichton the winner. That takes your argument to a ridiculous extreme, I know. But the fact is that alarmist scientists will not debate because they lose all of the debates. Facts enter into that result. After all, these are debates over verifiable scientific facts, not over who is the best American Idol.

BTW: I’m still patiently waiting for a link to the easily replicable Tyndall experiment that shows radiation overpowering convection to modulate the atmospheric lapse rate. I haven’t seen anything like this in the collected Tyndall papers.

Who said “radiation overpowers convection”? Where do you get such absurd ideas from? Radiation is the precursor to convection, they happen in tandem. Without radiation there would be no heat in the first place. Where the hell do you think our earths surface and the oceans get the vast majority of their energy from?

“… I must throw out my microwave oven, since it violates the second law of thermodynamics, it being impossible for microwaves from a cold cavity magnetron to make a hot liquid even hotter. Or something.”

Heh. I was hopping mad when I realized I had been conned all these years, too. Microwave ovens must work by post-hypnotic suggestion – the food isn’t really hot, you just think it is.

Or, something.

Dave Dardinger says:
March 10, 2012 at 3:05 pm

‘Unfortunately VOST people confuse the issue, and since CAGW advocates like to attack weak points, also thus weaken the entire skeptic position. I’d like to invite a nice polite collegial discussion, but from a practical POV I have to say, “knock it off!”’

AMEN! If people want to troll that kind of stuff, take it to one of the blogs that freely deal in fringe ideas. This is not my blog, and I cannot speak for Anthony, but seeing WUWT do such an amazing job countering the Warmists on the merits, it wrenches my gut every time I see posters trying to turn this site into another ignorable and inconsequential fringe hangout.

Ken Coffman says:
March 10, 2012 at 3:30 pm

“Have you ever seen a distribution of this “slowing”?”

It is not a permanent slowing. It lasts long enough for the surface temperature to rise, which reestablishes the same rate of cooling.

“What is the average rate of change with and without atmospheric CO2?”

Determining that requires a laboratory setup which holds everything else constant. The Earth’s regulatory system is too complicated to isolate that one relationship planetwide. The feedback effects render the question moot. That is the point that true skeptics are arguing. Insisting that basic physics does not work at all is a non-starter, which will hand victory in the debate to the Warmist side by default.

I should like to thank the many commenters who have been very kind about my lecture at Union College, and to reply to a few specific points that have been raised.

Leigh Kelley asks how Professor Lindzen derives a climate sensitivity one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate from the observation in Wentz et al. (2007) that the observed increase in evaporation from the Earth’s surface per Kelvin of warming is almost 6%, while the models incorrectly predict 1-3%.

Lindzen (2011) reports that Wentz et al. (2007) used space-based observations to measure how evaporation changed with temperature compared with results from models and found that in GCMs, evaporation rose 1-3% for each 1 K warming, while observed evaporation rose approximately three times faster, at 5.7%.

The heat flux associated with the percentage change ΔE/ΔT in evaporation per 1 K surface warming is (0.8 ΔE/ΔT) W m–2 K–1, and λ is in effect the reciprocal of this heat flux, so that (1) gives consequent transient climate sensitivity in Kelvin:

∆T(2x) = ∆F(2x) λ = ∆F(2x) / (0.8 ∆E/∆T). (1)

As a checksum, we can plug the modeled 3%-per-Kelvin (2) and 1%-per-Kelvin (3) increases in evaporation with warming, as well as the observed 5.7% increase (4), into (1) to determine the warming ∆T(2x) at a doubling of CO2 concentration:

Note that the implicit climate-sensitivity interval from the models (2,3) is [1.6, 4.6] K, which broadly coincides with the interval {1.5, 4.5] K in the IPCC’s 2001 report, and differs little from the [2.0, 4.5] K in the 2007 report. Accordingly, (2,3) show that the model offered by Professor Lindzen is well calibrated.

The IPCC’s current multi-model mean central estimate of the warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration is 3.3 K (IPCC, 2007, p. 798, box 10.2). However, the climate sensitivity derivable from the observed rate of increase in evaporation (4) is 0.8K, which is little more than one-quarter of the central estimate of climate sensitivity predicted by the models, and is about half of the IPCC’s current least estimate.

Jim R suggests that I might not be willing to debate with “a real scientist”. As Justin Pulliam’s article makes clear, much of the debate at Union College – particularly at the counter-meeting that I attended – was with the professor of environmental sciences, who did not seem to have read the scientific literature or the IPCC’s reports widely or with close attention. There were at least two other professors who took part in the debate, as well as various PhDs. In principle I am indeed willing to debate with “real scientists”. The advantage that the lay policy-maker has over the highly-specialist scientist is that the policy-maker, particularly if he has done his best to read the scientific literature extensively and carefully, may be able to acquire a better overall view of the subject than any specialist who is deeply read in his own specialism but not widely read outside it, though of course the layman will not know anything like as much as the specialist about the narrow field that is the specialist’s specialism.

Another commenter suggests that I should give a TED presentation. I should be happy to do this but I am disinclined to nominate myself. Anyone may nominate a speaker, so if anyone would like to put forward my name please feel free to do so.

CommieBoy says that “debate is not about the truth or the facts: it is about winning the debate.” With respect, I disagree. Debate, properly understood, is an exchange of ideas that will assist in determining the truth, and, when I take part in a debate, as I did at Union College, I do so to try to put across the truth as best I can understand it. As a layman, I am not always right: but, unlike most scientists, politicians, bureaucrats, journalists, academics, environmentalist racketeering groups and global-warming profiteers I have absolutely no financial interest in the global warming question.

At a recent debate at Oxford University, organized by the OU Engineering Society, I gave the undergraduates an argument from process engineering (which you will find in outline in my Union College presentation, and in more detail in my Hartford College lecture) to the effect that the closed-loop temperature-feedback gain in the climate system (i.e., the product of the Planck parameter and the net sum of all unamplified feedbacks) cannot much exceed 0.1, implying at most 1.3 K of warming per CO2 doubling, compared with the IPCC’s central estimate of 3.3 K. The opposing speaker who followed me opened his remarks by saying that was a professor who specialized in lecturing on feedbacks and that he had not understood a word of my argument, implying that it was nonsense. He did not, however, actually address the argument.

In the Union bar afterwards, I asked the Professor how it was that he had not understood my argument. He replied: “I understood it perfectly, but I said I did not understand it because I wanted to win.” In short, he lied. I do not know why it is that so many climate extremists (Gleick, Hansen, Mann, Pachauri etc. come to mind) find it acceptable not to adhere as closely as possible to the truth.

Fortunately, not all are like this. At a debate before the Galway branch of the Law Society of Ireland last month, I deployed the feedback argument and added, for good measure, that the Bode feedback-amplification equation upon which the IPCC relies for two-thirds of its projected warming from CO2 was not the appropriate equation. My opponent, Professor Bates, the author of several papers on feedbacks, not only understood the argument perfectly but agreed with it, and was honest enough to say so publicly.

Finally, I think the moderators are going to have to do something about the tiresome clique that, time and time again, hijack the comment threads at WattsUpWithThat by asserting that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect, when it has been repeatedly measured both in the laboratory and in the atmosphere, and its physics – even down to the quantum level – are quite well understood. My suggestion is that in future all such comments should be redirected to a separate thread of their own, so as not to interfere tiresomely, tediously and repetitively with the workings of this blog. It is beginning to look as though the soi-disant “dragon-slayers”, who deny the existence of the greenhouse effect, are intent not on rational, scientific debate but on outright sabotage. Roy Spencer’s thoughtful and well-considered explanation of how a colder body adjacent to a warmer body can make that warmer body warmer still is excellent, as is Jack Barrett’s paper explaining the behaviour of greenhouse-gas molecules at the quantum level when they interact with long-wave radiation at their characteristic absorption wavelengths (their “absorption bands”). Professor Christopher Essex offers an excellent analogy: when outgoing radiation at the right wavelength meets a greenhouse-gas molecule, it switches it on as though the molecule were a tiny radiator. There is plenty of doubt about how much additional warming our enhancement of the greenhouse effect may cause, but there is no legitimate doubt about the fact of the greenhouse effect. Perhaps the moderators could establish a Dunces’ Corner where those who deny two centuries of established scientific results in a baseless, unscientific and often loutishly bellicose manner can still have their say without interfering with those of us who would like to engage in courteous, scientific discussions.

“Excellent point about transmission but his approach is point of use.”

Yes, but, there are always transmission losses. I recognize that losses due to power line impedance may be small for a localized setup like this, but I’m also talking about other losses, e.g., in liberating, transporting and storing the hydrogen. I have to recall from memory what he said because I do not want to watch the whole video again right now, but it seems they have discovered some substance which naturally separates hydrogen and oxygen in water using sunlight with frankly astounding efficiency? What are the limits to the reaction? Surely, it is exothermic? What effect does temperature have on the rate of reaction? Is a thermal control system thereby necessary, which would impact the efficiency? Does the substance break down over time? What is the life cycle? Does it degrade the vessel in which it is contained, and what is the maintenance schedule for that?

These are just some of the questions that pop to the top of my head. I’m sure I would think of others given time. On such seemingly nit-picky details, great ideas of the past have floundered.

Such astounding efficiency gains would be a game changer. But, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I will have to see it happen with my own eyes before I believe it.

I’d also like to know how I can make Greek letters appear like that. Can I cut and paste from the character map? This is a test: D. No, I can already see that failed. Maybe \Delta (backslash=Delta)? Maybe (lt-greek-gt)D(lt-backslash-greek-gt) D?

Sounds like a great debate, but where does the “Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds” bit come from?
I would be a bit surprised if it comes from Monckton, since it was his former boss, Margaret Thatcher, who peddled the Global Warming theory as a weapon to destroy the miner’s unions and the coal mines.

.surely you’re the one who should be providing experimental proof?
______________________________

Exactly, Myrrh. If the IPCC wanted to attribute a warming property to radiation from a cooler atmosphere, then they should have proved its warming effect. I certainly can’t detect any warming in my backyard experiments, and nor would I expect to.

Prof Claes Johnson has now read my Radiated Energy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics prior to publication and has commented “Doug Cotton is one of the few people who have read and understood my analysis of blackbody radiation and radiative heat transfer and I fully endorse his essay.”

The fact that he said this is a sad reflection on the climate science community – demonstrating their reluctance to approach any contrary view with an open mind.

it’s not all that hard really, Radiation does not cause thermal energy to transfer from a cooler atmosphere to a warmer surface. All it can do is slow the radiative component of cooling. (Carbon dioxide molecules are not as effective as water vapour molecules in doing this because of their limited range of frequencies). However, evaporation and diffusion play just as great a part as radiation, and these processes can compensate for any slowing of the radiative cooling. All this is explained in detail (in about 6,600 word)s available on line on Tuesday this week.

Bob Diaz says:
“Currently 20 years of data shows that the feedback to be around “0.5″ and not “3.0″ as suggested by the alarmists. One can make a case that in the long term we may see a greater rise, BUT until the data appears showing that, it’s just wishful thinking.”

20 years of data suggests nothing. It could just as well be an effect of natural warming. How does one distinguish natural from anthropogenic warming?

In that there has been discussion of Christianity on this thread, let me just add that those who understand what Christianity is all about are very much aware of the fact that we have a relationship and communication channel with our Creator, through our living Saviour, Jesus Christ.

We are not in any way following a “religious” dogma. Nor are we earning our way to Heaven by doing good deeds, or failing to do bad ones. Heaven is a free gift, but, according to the words of God’s Son, is not for those who reject what Jesus taught and claimed about Himself. They stand condemned already – John 3:18.

All through the ages God has revealed Himself and communicated with humans. There could be no other process that could have explained how about 300 prophecies in the Old Testament came true in the New Testament hundreds of years later. (See Josh McDowell Evidence that Demands a Verdict.) I say that because we believe God can control whatever He wishes, including climate. He knows the future, because He plans it. He clearly controlled all the events that led up to the sacrificial death of His Son – paying the price for our sin. Even if you explain the darkness that came over the Earth when Christ was on the cross as being due to an eclipse of the Sun, God knew such was coming and planned the whole life of Jesus on Earth with perfect timing.

It does not seem surprising to myself that a number of noteworthy scientists have perhaps received information from their Creator about His Creation.

Maurizio Morabito (omnologos) says:
“One thing I’d change is, it is meaningless to talk of quadrillions. It’s a number beyond comprehension… For example a single quadrillion $ is equivalent to spending 10 million $ EVERY DAY for 270,000 YEARS, that is longer than the lifespan so far of our own species.”

For God’s sake, man, don’t say that where Obama can hear you; he’ll probably take it as a dare.

As you have noted for each 1 K warming … observed evaporation rose approximately … 5.7%. This relates to the point I make when I say that evaporation (and diffusion) will compensate for any slowing of the radiative component of cooling. The only effect that radiation from a cooler atmosphere can have on the surface is to slow down the rate of thermal energy transferred by radiation to the atmosphere. But, when it does so it leaves the surface temporarily warmer and so evaporation increases, as does diffusion which is followed by convection. These processes will compensate so there is no net effect from the backradiation. Radiation from a cooler atmosphere cannot transfer thermal energy to a warmer surface.

Prof Claes Johnson (see Computational Blackbody Radiation) and I are in total agreement as to the reason being that blackbodies do not convert the energy in radiation that was emitted spontaneously by a cooler source than their own temperature.

Note in passing, however, that backradiation sent to space when solar IR is absorbed does have a cooling effect, and carbon dioxide contributes to this, even though water vapour is the main player.

You need to stop accepting all the hoax about sensitivity. The figures like 255K are wrong, because that is not calculated by integration over 24 hours, taking into account rates of conduction into and out of the surface and many other factors. As you note ,even if the correct figure could be calculated, it would be a weighted mean for the whole earth-plus-atmosphere system. But it is the adiabatic lapse rate (itself a function of the acceleration due to gravity) that determines the surface temperature, along with the long-established temperature gradient from the core to the surface which has established a stable approximate equilibrium point at the interface of the surface and atmosphere over the life of the Earth..

It has nothing whatsoever to do with backradiation, because as I explained above, such can have no net effect.

Doug Cotton says: March 10, 2012 at 10:52 pm
It does not seem surprising to myself that a number of noteworthy scientists have perhaps received information from their Creator about His Creation.
——————————————————————————-

Indeed. Only last year I had a long chat with god, and he said that since he was an incredibly intelligent being he appreciated humans who were similarly intelligent, inquiring and rational, and was deeply saddened by those who merely followed their emotions without any evidence.

In fact, it became abundantly clear by the end of our conversation that god’s chosen people, who would inherit the Earth, were in fact the atheists.

WOW! I have been waiting over 20 years for this. I have called these warmists ; Mentally deficient . That has been confirmed by Dr. Mairwen Jones of Sydney Universirty . The conclusion of their study, is that 30% of warmist followers have AGWOCD. Anthropogenic global warming obsessive compulsive disorder .
Please ! please ! Tell our New Zealand politicians to revoke the evil carbon tax legislation .

Henry@Dave/Myrrh/Doug/Will etc
Dave is basically correct. The only thing I noticed is that the re-radiative properties of the GHG’s in the 0-5 um range have been largely ignored. If you mention such things as the fact that CO2 also causes direct cooling (by re-radiation of sunlight) you get answers like:
“we already counted that in earth’s albedo”, or: “we already discounted that in the incoming SW.”
Which is nonsense of course…. You have to come with a balance sheet on each GHG. It has also been said by someone that the warming effect of GHG’s is largely a delay in cooling, which is correct. For example, look at the absorption of ozone at around 10-11 um? It makes a dent in earth’s out-going radiation at 10-11. In other words what happens: Radiation from earth of 10-11 goes up, hits on the ozone, which is high up in the sky and which is already absorbed to capacity (because earth emits in the region 5-20 for 24 hours per day) , and therefore a great percentage (at least 50%, probably more) of that 10-11 is re-radiated back to earth, leading to entrapment of heat, or rather to a delay in cooling, leading to a warming effect. On the other hand, nobody in his right mind is going to bring an argument that we must reduce the ozone content, because on its own the ozone shields us from ca. 15-20 of incoming sunlight by re-radiating (deflection) in the UV region.
I found that it is the same like that with every GHG. There is positive and negative and nobody has compiled an exact balance sheet of each GHG.

I have written a piece on this that I think we can later call
“Back radiation CO2 – 101″
for those interested in the basics.
I am inviting comments on this piece from all of you, especially from you, Dave & Doug
to tell me if you think that the information I give there is correct, and/or if you can propose any changes?

“I say that because we believe God can control whatever He wishes, including climate.”

If you believe that, and you further believe that the climate will be OK simply because God will take care of it, then you have violated a commandment:

Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

From Matthew 4:1-11

Then the devil taketh him up into the holy city, and setteth him on a pinnacle of the temple, And saith unto him, If thou be the Son of God, cast thyself down: for it is written, He shall give his angels charge concerning thee: and in their hands they shall bear thee up, lest at any time thou dash thy foot against a stone. Jesus said unto him, It is written again, Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God.

God will not save you if you do something stupid. God will not be a slave to you so that you may do whatever you wish without consequence.

So, how about getting with the program, and helping decide whether A) Global Warming, putatively from our burning of fossil fuels, is or is not a problem and B) what, if anything, should be done about it. And, weigh the evidence without the presumption that you must have nothing to fear because God will bail us out in the end. He has made no such promise. Indeed, He has warned against such presumption.

[All – please note blog policy

“Certain topics are not welcome here and comments concerning them will be deleted. This includes topics on religion,…”

Please steer this away from any further discussion in this vein or comments will be snipped ~jove, Moderator]

‘I have had the pleasure of listening to His Lordship at previous campus events. He is at his best when confronted by a hostile audience. The angrier and more indignant they are, the more he seems to like it.’

There was a day, many years ago, when a conviction politician of socialist leanings in the UK used to spend his summers as a young man jousting with attendees at the Conservative Party conference.

As he said: ‘no point wasting my time convincing people who already agree with me…..’

Speaking to you friends all the time is for massaging egos.

Speaking to, engaging with and arguing with those of differing opinion is real politics.

“The only effect that radiation from a cooler atmosphere can have on the surface is to slow down the rate of thermal energy transferred by radiation to the atmosphere.”

That’s a substantial climb down from what you have been saying previously on these boards, though you do not acknowledge it. But, that is exactly the process everyone is describing. The “backradiation” explanation is simply an heuristic argument based on the fact that, in equilibrium, the backradiation from the atmosphere and the incoming solar radiation must balance with the outgoing surface radiation.

“But, when it does so it leaves the surface temporarily warmer and so evaporation increases, as does diffusion which is followed by convection. These processes will compensate so there is no net effect from the backradiation. “

OK, you are now describing a feedback process which would tend to ameliorate the warming. But, you must express it in the language of mathematics and quantify it, or it will never fly. Right now, you’re just sketching a plausible narrative. That is what the Warmists do, and think it is proof. They are wrong. Just because something sounds good, and a couple of other guys, or a whole army of them, think so, too, that does not make it right.

“Please steer this away from any further discussion in this vein or comments will be snipped”

Got it. It made me extremely uncomfortable even mentioning it in this venue. But, since you let DC’s first comment through, I felt it might be helpful to try to reach him from that POV.

[Reply – yes not aimed at you specifically – previous comment from Doug approved by another moderator. Delicate balance to allow some comments but prevent any unwelcome stuff from taking hold. Jove, Mod]

A agree that we do have our own responsibility! That is exactly why I started my own investigation.
I am sure it is the same with Doug.
The problem for me was to figure out whether the warming we observed in the past 3 or 4 decades was natural or caused by an increase in GHG’s and to find out whether more CO2 is bad or beneficial.

If the warming were caused by more GHG’s one would expect minimum temps. to rise, pushing up average temperatures. That is not happening. I found the opposite is happening: Average temps. are being pushed up by the high rises in the maxima. That means the warming was largely natural –
either the sun shone a bit more brightly and/ or there were less clouds and/or there less ozone…
etc. There are different theories on that.

It appears that CO2 is really plant food and together with the extra warming and man wanting more trees and gardens, some extra greening of earth which has indeed taken place.
This has also caused some heat entrapment.
Note the difference in my tables Grootfontein (Namibia) where it has been getting very much greener and Tandil in Argentine where they hacked all the trees off.

So the point you could make is that indirectly some of the warming is due to the CO2 but is the greening of earth not exactly what God wanted us to do? In fact, I think we should our knowledge to the next planet, Mars and start making that also a green planet so that people can move there as well.

Brian Johnson uk says:
March 10, 2012 at 1:36 am
Where is Lord Monckton’s ‘Proof’ that there is a Creator?

Is that Scientific Faith or Scientific Proof?

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

He doesn’t claim to have proof . . . that is faith.

And it was reported here as part of a comment Lord Monckton made in a private setting, away from the lecture. It has nothing to do with his scientific beliefs.

The religious aspect can be taken out of the debate . . . f’rinstance, Kevin Rudd, ex-PM of Australia and one of Down Under’s most ardent warmists, is a committed Christian.

I’m a denier, both of God and CAGW, but if anyone wants to believe in the former then that’s their business. As, by the way, is a belief in CAGW. It’s when either lot tries to impose their views on me and sticks their hands in my pocket that I take exception.

I attended a Lord Monckton lecture in Whangarei, New Zealand, last year. From this article, it was similar in content to the Schenectady address and brilliantly delivered.

Monckton was very generous with his time and after a drawn-out Q&A session sat with members of the audience and discussed a wide variety of topics, covering ecological, scientific, economic and political areas. Very few of them came within cooee of his intellectual power but he gave everyone a fair hearing and a considered answer.

All in all, a brilliant fellow and one of the realists’ greatest assets.

Astley Agreed i don’t believe human induced excess or otherwise of atmospheric gases C02 etc., (except water vapour which will cause cooling if cloud increases), during phases of excess will cause ANY long term effect on climate (100 to 1000 yrs) due to negative feedback otherwise we would have been wiped out a long time ago. Any temp excess is lost out to space. Excessive cooling probably causes atmospheric heat to be “retained”

Not really. All the NASA and Trenberth et al energy diagrams treat solar radiation and atmospheric radiation exactly the same, with a clear implication that the energy in radiation from the atmosphere is converted to thermal energy in the surface, which could then exit by evaporation, diffusion or additional radiation.

Please understand that I cannot cover everything I’ve written in 6,600 words (plus graphics) in a post like this, so you’ll need to read it Tuesday (GMT) I gather

But, you must express it in the language of mathematics and quantify it,

Do you consider that the IPCC quantified the increase in diffusion and evaporation due to any decrease in radiation? (Anyway, I approach the “proof” differently – see #3 in the Appendix re this issue.) Did they quantify the effect on slowing the radiation due to carbon dioxide molecules, compared with water vapour molecules, noting that the CO2 ones have far fewer frequencies at which they can resonate, and thus far less effect than WV molecules on slowing the radiation rate. That means there are 20 to 50 times as many WV molecules each having a far greater effect than each CO2 molecule.

Now do you see the importance of the difference between conversion to thermal energy (which would violate the Second Law) and merely slowing the rate of radiation without adding energy to the surface?

Yes, I’ve mentioned this in Section 6 and used the red and yellow graphic “Solar Radiation Spectrum” at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_variation There is a chapter in Slaying the Sky Dragon in which the assumed warming effect was shown to be only 13% of the cooling effect, but I have not checked the calculations and don’t consider there to be any warming effect at all anyway.

Of course water vapour send far more solar backradiation to space than CO2, so this certainly helps to rule out any possible positive feedback due to WV.

Ken Coffman says:
March 10, 2012 at 5:57 pmIt occurs to me there is one more miraculous feature of atmospheric CO2 as imagined by purveyors of conventional wisdom: it heats up very quickly, but cools very slowly. I wonder how that works and if there are other examples of this kind of amazing asymmetry in nature.

It’s a supermolecule! I shall add that to the properties I know about it.

Defying gravity carbon dioxide travels under his own volition through the atmosphere and stays up in the sky for hundreds and thousands of years, astonishing.

Becomes a bit of a bully though in leaving weight and volume behind, it slims down to practically nothing but a hard dot and under its own momentum rises from the ground at great speeds and travels through the empty volumeless atmosphere bashing into other molecules which have likewise shed their plump attractiveness – getting thoroughly mixed up in their aloofness they lose all sense of up and down. Well, lose sense of everything really.

BTW: I’m still patiently waiting for a link to the easily replicable Tyndall experiment that shows radiation overpowering convection to modulate the atmospheric lapse rate. I haven’t seen anything like this in the collected Tyndall papers.

It’s not there? I gave up looking and settled for getting lost in the fascinating read following the meticulous thinking of real scientists doing real cutting edge experiments to try and make sense of our world.

Thanks for this. The headline summary was reposted at UKIP Scotland blog, with a link to the actual video of the lecture at the stream provider (applet not embeddable in wordpress) , and a link to the full story on WUWT. If only Lord Monckton could be allowed to have his lectures broadcast on mainstream media, then he would surely embarrass all the “Global Warming” collaborators. It is too easy for the “computerati” to forget that still the vast majority of people still get their “news” from the old “one-eyed goggle-box” and still yet rely on, so called “newspapers”, like the Washington Times and similar dead tree press.

Eh? Myrrh, did you even read the references in your own reference? Dr. Spencer retracted nothing, and even added real-world examples of why LaTour is wrong. I respect(ed) O’Sullivan’s reputation, but he blew that one big time.

Please point out the added real-world examples Spencer gave to show why Latour is wrong.

My emphasis.

To remind you what O’Sullivan wrote: “Dr. Spencer, without question a leading researcher of great integrity, has since gone on record to concede that he may be wrong and being misled by an ‘assumption bias.”

“This is really odd, you ask for experimental proof from basic traditional science on this…”

Nope. I’m asking for experimental proof of fringe science, which contradicts “basic traditional science” used by both sides of the CAGW issue.

Hmm, well let me put it this way. Show me empirical work and explanations from what you call “basic traditional science” – and, please fetch it. Don’t bother giving any more “thought experiments”, come back with actual proven scientific experiments. And remember, what is called basic traditional science says categorically and unequivocally that heat does not flow from colder to hotter, there is no ‘backradiation’.

“..surely you’re the one who should be providing experimental proof?”

Why? I have nothing to gain, nothing to prove. If LaTour, however, gets the results he expects from a real-life version of the “Yes Virginia” experiment, he not only gets a Nobel Prize, but he also gets to say, “Bazinga, Spencer!” I’m absolutely baffled that he hasn’t yet done so.

He’s already done so.. He showed that it is the nonsense that it is, it is already falsified – because all real basic traditional physics contradicts it. You can’t merely parrot back those words and claim they relate to your novelties..

Latour is a real empirically trained applied scientist – without his understanding the Apollo programme wouldn’t have worked – you really think he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? You really think some still not empirically shown ‘thought experiment’ from Spencer has anything of any worth to claim against that?

Put your thought experiment down in proper physical experiment before you dare claim that it is “real basic science”.

You haven’t done so.

That “both sides” of the CAGW use this unproven thought experiment shows the origin of the paucity of rational scientific thinking from them..

Myrrh, perhaps you could use your influence to persuade LaTour, Johnson, or Cotton to do the definitive experiment that should consign the IPCC to the dustbin of history? For the children? :-)

Seriously, stop being ridiculous – you provide the experiment to prove that this backradiation claim of yours is real world science and not as it clearly is, an idea from the imagination based on no known real world basic physics.

It is falsified from the start because it contradicts all real world basic applied and tested physics.

Enough of this bs.

Latour says: “Examples are all around us. Chemical engineers design and operate radiant, convection and conduction furnaces, kilns, forges, chemical reactors and boilers for refining petroleum, manufacturing chemicals and generating electricity since 1920. We no longer need more experiments. No back-radiation is observed. Conducting this experiment will allow nature to tell which prediction is correct. This has been done already by Prof Nasif Nahle, reported on 26 Sep 11 [2.]. Findings confirm the prediction T remains 150 is correct because a warm body cannot absorb cooler back-radiation.” http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still

That’s real world basic physics – it is already proven and used in the real world in industries all around us! Really, get a grip.

“Examples are all around us. Chemical engineers design and operate radiant, convection and conduction furnaces, kilns, forges, chemical reactors and boilers for refining petroleum, manufacturing chemicals and generating electricity since 1920. We no longer need more experiments. No back-radiation is observed.”

“No back-radiation is observed”

Enough of this nonsense fantasy fisics passing itself of as real world.

“No back-radiation is observed”

“No back-radiation is observed”

If you’ve got anything that disproves 100 years of testing in industries in the real world where this ‘imagined backradiation claim’ is never observed – show it.

But, that is exactly the process everyone is describing. The “backradiation” explanation is simply an heuristic argument based on the fact that, in equilibrium, the backradiation from the atmosphere and the incoming solar radiation must balance with the outgoing surface radiation.

Thank you. This is a point some willfully ignore. For a system to remain in a state of stability, it must radiate away the initiating constant forcing. One Watt in and one Watt out.

Since the gas molecule absorbs and the re-radiates the wave equally in all directions it must radiate half away and half back.

The half back cannot just disappear, the law of energy conservation doesn’t allow it. Consequently it will then be absorbed by the black body and re-radiate back.

This reverberation will build until the molecule is absorbing two Watts, with one Watt going back and one Watt going away. At this point the system is in a state of radiative stability.

What the detractors don’t understand is this a “Theoretical construct”.

Einstein was a master of this technique, as were many of his contemporaries.

Myrrh says
Seriously, stop being ridiculous – you provide the experiment to prove that this backradiation claim of yours is real world science and not as it clearly is, an idea from the imagination based on no known real world basic physics.

It is falsified from the start because it contradicts all real world basic applied and tested physics.

Enough of this bs.

Henry@Myrrh

Myrrh
You are bitter. I think I smell something rotten.
Trying to make you understand even the very basics of radiation I have asked you repeatedly to explain to me why white clouds -carrying more wv and less water- are white
and why dark clouds – carrying more water and less wv- are dark (blue).
Up to now you have not even bothered to investigate and come back to me with an answer.
I suggest you go to Back-radiation CO2 – 101

Finally, I think the moderators are going to have to do something about the tiresome clique that, time and time again, hijack the comment threads at WattsUpWithThat by asserting that there is no such thing as a greenhouse effect, when it has been repeatedly measured both in the laboratory and in the atmosphere, and its physics – even down to the quantum level – are quite well understood.

I asked you in another discussion for this ‘claimed to be in existence’, “it has been repeatedly measured both in the laboratory and in the atmosphere, and its physics – even down to the quantum level – are quite well understood.”, perhaps you missed it?

It is something I continue to ask for, it is never produced. Do you want to have a go here at providing it?

My suggestion is that in future all such comments should be redirected to a separate thread of their own, so as not to interfere tiresomely, tediously and repetitively with the workings of this blog. It is beginning to look as though the soi-disant “dragon-slayers”, who deny the existence of the greenhouse effect, are intent not on rational, scientific debate but on outright sabotage.

Gosh, you’re now claiming you’re debating rationally by wanting us censored in this debate?

Roy Spencer’s thoughtful and well-considered explanation of how a colder body adjacent to a warmer body can make that warmer body warmer still is excellent, as is Jack Barrett’s paper explaining the behaviour of greenhouse-gas molecules at the quantum level when they interact with long-wave radiation at their characteristic absorption wavelengths (their “absorption bands”). Professor Christopher Essex offers an excellent analogy: when outgoing radiation at the right wavelength meets a greenhouse-gas molecule, it switches it on as though the molecule were a tiny radiator. There is plenty of doubt about how much additional warming our enhancement of the greenhouse effect may cause, but there is no legitimate doubt about the fact of the greenhouse effect.

Please see my post to Gary Hladik, at the moment I can’t give you a comment number as it hasn’t yet appeared, so I give an extract and expect you to respond honestly as you expect from others debating this, trying to censor my questions shows hypocrisy – do you realise that?

To Gary Hladik, Monckton and All Greenhouse Effect claimants:

Seriously, stop being ridiculous – you provide the experiment to prove that this backradiation claim of yours is real world science and not as it clearly is, an idea from the imagination based on no known real world basic physics.

It is falsified from the start because it contradicts all real world basic applied and tested physics.

Enough of this bs.

Latour says: “Examples are all around us. Chemical engineers design and operate radiant, convection and conduction furnaces, kilns, forges, chemical reactors and boilers for refining petroleum, manufacturing chemicals and generating electricity since 1920. We no longer need more experiments. No back-radiation is observed. Conducting this experiment will allow nature to tell which prediction is correct. This has been done already by Prof Nasif Nahle, reported on 26 Sep 11 [2.]. Findings confirm the prediction T remains 150 is correct because a warm body cannot absorb cooler back-radiation.” http://www.slayingtheskydragon.com/en/blog/185-no-virginia-cooler-
objects-cannot-make-warmer-objects-even-warmer-still

That’s real world basic physics – it is already proven and used in the real world in industries all around us! Really, get a grip.

No back-radiation is observed”

Perhaps the moderators could establish a Dunces’ Corner where those who deny two centuries of established scientific results in a baseless, unscientific and often loutishly bellicose manner can still have their say without interfering with those of us who would like to engage in courteous, scientific discussions.

Courteous discussion? You call demanding those opposing your point of view be not only censored, but denigrated. You are a hypocrite, proved by your posts here where you expect from others what you don’t see fit to extend to those exposing the failings of your physics.

Fortunately, not all are like this. At a debate before the Galway branch of the Law Society of Ireland last month, I deployed the feedback argument and added, for good measure, that the Bode feedback-amplification equation upon which the IPCC relies for two-thirds of its projected warming from CO2 was not the appropriate equation. My opponent, Professor Bates, the author of several papers on feedbacks, not only understood the argument perfectly but agreed with it, and was honest enough to say so publicly.

Would you like to try again?

You have never shown any of this actually exists.

There is no The Greenhouse Effect – why not? Because skullduggery has been employed to make the pretence that there is such a thing – dishonest in intent, deceitful in creation, and bullying censorship used in practice to keep this from being discussed.

Those creating The Greenhouse Effect have taken out of their energy budget, the whole of the Water Cycle!

Yes, really, the con, the scientific fraud of AGW and TGE is all from that sleight of hand, and, all you ‘warmists’ arguing that backradiation from CO2 exists are pushing this fraud without ever giving any proof that the Greenhouse effect exists, because you can’t, there is none.

What happens when we put the Water Cycle back in? Think deserts. An Earth without the Water Cycle would be 67°C, 52°C hotter than the 15°C we have.

The ‘greenhouse gas’ water cools the Earth by 52°C.

Simply by taking out the whole chunk of the process of one of the two major players in the energy budget and then claiming that the plus 33°C difference between the Earth without any atmosphere at all, at -18°C, and the Earth with complete atmosphere, at 15°C, is due to the unproven Greenhouse Effect from greenhouse gas warming and by presenting a mangled physics in support – this is a scientific fraud.

Carbon dioxide is fully part of the Water Cycle which cools the Earth in our real atmosphere, where we have gravity and therefore weight and volume and real molecules which have attraction, carbon dioxide and water vapour spontaneously join and become carbonic acid – all pure clean rain is carbonic acid.

Rain which is formed when water vapour, anyway lighter than air, evaporates as it is heated at the surface and rises to the colder heights of the heavy gaseous atmosphere pressing down on our shoulders a ton weight, there giving up its heat and condensing back to fluid water or ice to come down as rain or snow together with all the carbon dioxide around.

And as for the other major player in the energy budget, the Sun, that too has been distorted beyond recognition in The Greenhouse Effect energy budget – gosh, no direct heat from your Sun even reaches Earth!

And you’ve given all the properties of the Sun’s direct thermal energy, thermal infrared, to the Sun’s light waves!

What an absolutely ludicrous topsy-turvyish world, great fun if through the looking glass with Alice – but not so much fun when those like you are intent on censoring us to foist this fantasy fisics onto the unsuspecting general population.

Of course you want us censored – you prefer your audience to accept your intellectual baby talk as if real world physics. Difficult to believe that a public school in your day would have taught any of this, that didn’t know the difference between heat and light..

Yes it is. Take any IR temperature thermometer (Infrared Temperature Gun) outside at night, point it up to the sky and press the button. What you’ll read is the equivalent temperature to the “backradiation” commonly called the greenhouse effect, that’s what the instrument is measuring, not the temperature of some distant planet.
Please read:

I can confirm that when I took “Heat Transfer” in the ’80’s we used that same equation for estimating cooling. Note the equation calculates the NET radiation by subtracting the ambient temperature to the fourth power (AIR) from the temperature of the cooling object to the fourth power(SURFACE) and then multiplying by the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Constant. Algebraically this is IDENTICAL to calculating the objects radiation and the “backradiation” separately with the Stefan-Boltzmann equation and then subtracting the back radiation from the object’s radiation. Basically, it’s subtracting the “backradiation” from the cooling object’s radiation based on the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and Engineers (not known for accounting for anything that violates Laws of Physics) have been doing this for decades.

(Note: I used the word estimating because the atmosphere isn’t technically a grey body, but Stefan-Boltzmann still works good enough for most Engineering applications.)

“Hmm, well let me put it this way. Show me empirical work and explanations from what you call “basic traditional science” – and, please fetch it. Don’t bother giving any more “thought experiments”, come back with actual proven scientific experiments. And remember, what is called basic traditional science says categorically and unequivocally that heat does not flow from colder to hotter, there is no ‘backradiation’. ”

Oh dear. Is this argument still going on?

Basic traditional science says *categorically* and *unequivocally* that heat *can* flow from colder to hotter, and in an *unrelated* point that backradiation does exist. You have misunderstood the second law – it doesn’t say what you think it says. And scores of people have provided numerous examples, which you just skirt around and then go back to saying what you said before.

The most obvious example of heat flowing from colder to hotter is a refrigerator. The second law says that work has to be done to accomplish it, but it does not say that heat can never flow from colder to hotter. Refrigerators don’t break any laws.

A more familiar example is a blanket. The blanket is colder than you are, but it still causes your skin temperature to rise when you cover yourself with it.

A third example is a microwave oven. A room-temperature cavity resonator produces radiation at a wavelength associated with blackbody temperatures down around absolute zero which is absorbed by hot food to make it hotter. It’s an absolute nonsense to say that ‘cold’ radiation can’t be absorbed by warm objects.

Another familiar observation is that hot things cool down more slowly when put in a slightly cooler container than when put in a very much colder one. The heat flow by radiation between objects of the same material at temperatures T1 and T2 is proportional to T1^4 – T2^4. This additive formula is exactly what you’d get if each radiated power proportional to T^4 independently, and the net flow was simply the radiative energy flowing one way minus the radiative energy flowing the other way. This two-way flow still conforms to the second law, because the second law only talks about *net* flows.

A more sophisticated experiment is to set up an infrared pinhole camera. A target consisting of warm and very cold panels is set up. A sheet of super-cold ice with a one inch hole is set up in front of it. Then a (warm) thermally insulating plate is placed in front of that. The pinhole setup demonstrates the radiation travels in straight lines. The cooling of the plate by radiation is slightly faster where it is not being irradiated by the warm panels. The difference is small and takes some sensitivity to detect, but it is arguably the best demonstration.

The basic physics has been demonstrated time and again, and is in routine use by engineers and physicists. All objects radiate independently of their surroundings. Radiation of any frequency can be absorbed by objects at all temperatures. Only the *net* heat flow, in the absence of external work, is constrained by the second law, and all this stuff disputing it is contradicted by everyday experience and is distracting – especially when innocent threads are spammed with off-topic bletherings on the subject. We make space and discuss it properly often enough – why bombard every other thread with it? It doesn’t become more convincing by repetition, you know.

And as an attack on the AGW orthodoxy it misses the target entirely – because it is based on another fundamental misunderstanding of how the greenhouse effect works. The greenhouse effect has nothing to do with backradiation anyway, so shooting backradiation down would achieve precisely nothing.
The greenhouse effects occurs because:
1. The Earth gets a roughly constant heat input from the sun.
2. Outer space is a vacuum and objects in a vacuum can only lose heat by radiation.
3. The hotter an object is the more it radiates.
4. The radiating surface heats or cools until it is at the right temperature to radiate all the heat absorbed.
5. Because of greenhouse gases this planetary surface radiating to space is *not* the solid surface, but a fuzzy layer averaging about 6 km up.
6. Gases cool on expanding and are warmed by compression.
7. In a convective atmosphere air rising and falling is expanded and compressed by air pressure, this sets up a constant vertical temperature gradient.
8. Convection on Earth is driven by differences in insolation, between equator and poles, and between day and night. (A temperature difference is required to drive any heat engine.)
9. The temperature gradient combined with the height difference between the surface radiating to space and the solid ground causes a temperature difference, maintained by the external work done by convection, that keeps the ground warmer than the radiating surface.
10. The equation for the greenhouse effect is T_surf = T_eff + LR * AARTS. T_surf is the surface temperature. T_eff is the effective radiative temperature. LR is the lapse rate (the vertical thermal gradient), and AARTS is the average altitude of radiation to space. This has been the standard equation for it since the 1960s.

Note that backradiation has not been mentioned. It is not in the picture.

Here’s Carl Sagan on Venus: ( http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1967ApJ…149..731S ) He calculates the predicted surface temperature, you’ll note, with *no mention* of backradiation or even CO2’s greenhouse properties. It’s a result of cloud height. Backradiation is a complete red herring. Stop wasting your time on it.

I *know* this won’t stop the argument, but it makes me feel better to have a rant about it every now and then. Apologies to everyone I’ve just bored to death.

In any thermal test chamber, the effects of free flow convection will produce an undesirable temperature gradient if allowed to go unchecked. One method to curtail the formation of these temperature gradients is to design the chamber such that the air circulates from the top of the chamber to the bottom. This “counterflow” design will aid in mixing the warm air that tends to raise to the top of the chamber with the cooler air that will tend to settle on the bottom of the chamber.

Oh, what silliness from the engineering community. Of course, the hot air at the top of the chamber radiates IR to the bottom. If radiation from cold, rarefied air can increase the Earth’s surface temperature by 33C then radiation from heated air must increase the temperature of the bottom of the chamber by what? Hundreds of degrees? I’m surprised these chambers don’t self-melt into slag.

Such astounding efficiency gains would be a game changer. But, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I will have to see it happen with my own eyes before I believe it.
==========
I completely agree, Dr. Nocera’s POP presentation isn’t intended to cover all the technical aspects but, in my opinion, does an excellent job of framing the issues and proposing a solution that looks at the problems holistically instead of separating them into separate tasks which fail to deliver a definitive solution.

We need a game changer that addresses solutions for the end user instead of stumbling over the definition of climate problems. This is why I suggested Lord Monckton, if his travels took him to Boston, should consider chatting with Dr. Nocera. Lord Monckton’s lecture includes issues related to economics and the economics relate to alternatives and innovations.

What better way to bring the economic point home than to illustrate solutions with a pure product advantage in the marketplace which are largely overlooked or under funded because of this foolish debate and funding to shore up the IPCC’s inability to be honest about the state of their science.

The IPCC should NOT be in the solutions game related to their own conclusions. Disbanding the UN solution work groups would go a long way to restoring confidence in the Science. IMO, Illustrating the UN solutions side-by-side with other alternatives is a great way to illustrate this.

(They measured this re-radiation from CO2 as it bounced back to earth from the moon. So the direction was sun-earth (day)-moon (night, i.e. unlit by sun) -earth (night). Follow the green line in fig. 6, bottom. Note that it already starts at 1.2 um, then one peak at 1.4 um, then various peaks at 1.6 um and 3 big peaks at 2 um. You can see that it all comes back to us via the moon in fig. 6 top & fig. 7. Note that even methane cools the atmosphere by re-radiating in the 2.2 to 2.4 um range).

it might be worth discussing if the net effect of more CO2 is more warming or more cooling?

Not that anyone actually has any decent neasured figures on it. As is my experience./

This video lecture has nearly the same content as the Schenectady performance, but is more than twice as long and has much better audio and video. After appearing at Princeton earlier in the day, Lord Christopher Monkcton spoke on March 8th, 2012 at the University of Minnesota, on the latest leg of his USA College Tour, when he updated his well known Climate of Freedom lecture, to take account of the latest research and revelations of political shenanigans.

This video is in an 8-Part Playlist, lasting for around 110 minutes.

This is at the top of the main webpage
at the website linked to the name “Axel”

The Senior Director of Communications & Marketing at Union College, Jill Hungsberg, should be notified of this piece. Her email address is: hungsbej@union.edu

Union is a highly selective small college that was founded in 1795. It is unusual for a school of this comparatively small size ( 2,200 ) to offer strong programs in liberal arts, engineering and sciences.

It was not necessary for Mr. Pulliam to engage in the literary device of painting a blanket picture characterizing the student body and faculty as a monolithic entity. That smacks of an amateurish, propaganda-like attempt to generalize the College as representative of the evil academy. It does you no credit.

We are in agreement generally, then. I hope his idea pans out. But, for now, I still think the real solution is nuclear power.

mkelly says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:24 am

“Microwaves are not thermal radiation.”

This is a useless distinction. All radiation is thermal radiation. Any wavelength can heat an object if it is absorbed by that object. But, typical microwave ovens broadcast at 12 cm, which is near infrared.

‘Unfortunately VOST people confuse the issue, and since CAGW advocates like to attack weak points, also thus weaken the entire skeptic position. I’d like to invite a nice polite collegial discussion, but from a practical POV I have to say, “knock it off!”’
________________________________________________
Bart says:
March 10, 2012 at 7:47 pm

…..AMEN! If people want to troll that kind of stuff, take it to one of the blogs that freely deal in fringe ideas. This is not my blog, and I cannot speak for Anthony, but seeing WUWT do such an amazing job countering the Warmists on the merits, it wrenches my gut every time I see posters trying to turn this site into another ignorable and inconsequential fringe hangout……
________________________________________________

I very much disagree. Anthony is not running an echo chamber. If someone brings in an off the wall idea that is very wrong it gets trampled into the dust, AND the people who are doing the trampling use science to back up their point. THAT is the beauty of this site. Otherwise it would be like the warmist sites an echo chamber.

I agree that it is a difficult balancing act. Obviously, he shouldn’t (IMHO, at least) entertain posters who claim that the climate is being manipulated by space aliens. The question is, where do you draw the line?

I must admit to having a twinge of self-consciousness when I wrote that, as there are a few items I still have valid concerns about (e.g., the attribution of the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the last 1/2 century to wholly anthropogenic sources) which are generally accepted as settled even by most technically oriented skeptics. But, in my defense, when I bring it up, I do not simply repeat myself and attempt to bludgeon people into submission – at least, I don’t think I do – but try to listen to their counterarguments and respond to them.

Maybe you are right, and it is best to leave things open. It may be a mirage, but I think Doug Cotton in particular is beginning to address the issue from a more rigorous standpoint. So, maybe it is all to the good in the end. But, those of us who worry that the more extreme views may become fodder for preemptive dismissal by the alarmists have a responsibility to make sure the fringe doesn’t take over the forum and paint us all in the same shade.

On the other hand, maybe the alarmists are going to nail us no matter what we do, and we should take Otter’s advice: Toga Party.

If I may ask one favor of the extreme contrarians, though, it would be this: keep it short. Nobody (well, I doubt many) is going to read your dissertation length, hand-waving, assertion laden exposition. Make your points, and then back off and respond precisely to criticisms. It’s these long posts that get really annoying. If you take more than three paragraphs to make your point, then you don’t really have a point.

“Leigh Kelley asks how Professor Lindzen derives a climate sensitivity one-third of the IPCC’s central estimate from the observation in Wentz et al. (2007) that the observed increase in evaporation from the Earth’s surface per Kelvin of warming is almost 6%, while the models incorrectly predict 1-3%.

Lindzen (2011) reports that Wentz et al. (2007) used space-based observations to measure how evaporation changed with temperature compared with results from models and found that in GCMs, evaporation rose 1-3% for each 1 K warming, while observed evaporation rose approximately three times faster, at 5.7%.

The heat flux associated with the percentage change ΔE/ΔT in evaporation per 1 K surface warming is (0.8 ΔE/ΔT) W m–2 K–1, and λ is in effect the reciprocal of this heat flux, so that (1) gives consequent transient climate sensitivity in Kelvin:

∆T(2x) = ∆F(2x) λ = ∆F(2x) / (0.8 ∆E/∆T). (1)

As a checksum, we can plug the modeled 3%-per-Kelvin (2) and 1%-per-Kelvin (3) increases in evaporation with warming, as well as the observed 5.7% increase (4), into (1) to determine the warming ∆T(2x) at a doubling of CO2 concentration:

Note that the implicit climate-sensitivity interval from the models (2,3) is [1.6, 4.6] K, which broadly coincides with the interval {1.5, 4.5] K in the IPCC’s 2001 report, and differs little from the [2.0, 4.5] K in the 2007 report. Accordingly, (2,3) show that the model offered by Professor Lindzen is well calibrated.

The IPCC’s current multi-model mean central estimate of the warming in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration is 3.3 K (IPCC, 2007, p. 798, box 10.2). However, the climate sensitivity derivable from the observed rate of increase in evaporation (4) is 0.8K, which is little more than one-quarter of the central estimate of climate sensitivity predicted by the models, and is about half of the IPCC’s current least estimate.”

Without proper references, there is no way to check whether Monckton’s statements are correct. Monckton doesn’t define what is meant by “evaporation”, and doesn’t give a citation for his claim that “in GCM’s evaporation rose 1 to 3% per degree C”. Is he talking about evaporation rate, or water vapor concentration in the atmosphere? He also doesn’t specify the mechanism by which evaporation contributes to climate sensitivity. Is it transport of energy into the atmosphere by transpiration, or the increased downwelling radiation from an increased amount of water in that atmosphere? He also gives an expression for heat flux but which has the wrong units, W M-2 K-1. He also refers to an equation (1) which is not shown. There is no way to make any sense of what he has written. It is a travesty.
I am sure that this comment will not be posted.

I agree that it is a difficult balancing act. Obviously, he shouldn’t (IMHO, at least) entertain posters who claim that the climate is being manipulated by space aliens. The question is, where do you draw the line?

I must admit to having a twinge of self-consciousness when I wrote that, as there are a few items I still have valid concerns about (e.g., the attribution of the rise in atmospheric CO2 concentration in the last 1/2 century to wholly anthropogenic sources) which are generally accepted as settled even by most technically oriented skeptics. But, in my defense, when I bring it up, I do not simply repeat myself and attempt to bludgeon people into submission – at least, I don’t think I do – but try to listen to their counterarguments and respond to them.

Maybe you are right, and it is best to leave things open…..
________________________________________________
Bart,
I think that many people here on WUWT forget that for every Doug, who is relatively new to the site, there are one hundred lurkers. Most of those lurkers have a lot less science and math then the people who post here do. Heck most of them haven’t even heard of thermodynamics much less the second law. So even though this is all old hat for regulars, repeating the discussion occasionally is very important because the primary goal for all of us is the advancement of science and the education of those who have been messed up by our education system.

Without educating the public the green Luddites will win.

BTW the “for every one person you hear from there are 100 others” comes from a customer service study done by a corporation I worked for.

HenryP says:
March 11, 2012 at 7:39 am
Myrrh says
Seriously, stop being ridiculous – you provide the experiment to prove that this backradiation claim of yours is real world science and not as it clearly is, an idea from the imagination based on no known real world basic physics. It is falsified from the start because it contradicts all real world basic applied and tested physics.

Enough of this bs.

Henry@Myrrh

Myrrh
You are bitter. I think I smell something rotten.

Look around you, I’m a 12 hour flight away..

Trying to make you understand even the very basics of radiation I have asked you repeatedly to explain to me why white clouds -carrying more wv and less water- are white
and why dark clouds – carrying more water and less wv- are dark (blue).

Do you see my problem? You’re making up your own terms in a science, optics, which has long ago defined the terms they use to describe specific processes and effects.

I had earlier posted on refraction and reflection/scattering, what these mean, visible light gets reflected/scattered by being absorbed by the electrons of the molecules of nitrogen and oxygen in our real world atmosphere [it is therefore not ‘transparent’ to visible as claimed in the TGE AGW energy budget..], and in the real world water is a transparent medium for visible, visible gets transmitted through without being absorbed.

These are technical terms in optics which mean specific things. I posted a good description on refraction through transparent mediums. These are known effects and processes in what happens when light meets matter and are applicable directly to your question about clouds.

So, when I ask the question, in order to be able to discuss your question further, “Do you mean refraction or reflection?” and you reply:

I mean deflection also called back radiation or re-radiation.

I have no choice but to reply as I did:

“I have no idea what those words mean here, I simply don’t know what you’re talking about. When you can explain it in the language of OPTICS, into which category this falls, then we can discuss it further.

Until then, thanks for the discussion, but I’m leaving this.”

But, after your post to me here, I have no interest in discussing this further with you.

As it stands I am inclined to agree with the others and believe you are a troll sent by the CAGW to hi-jack all serious discussions here at WUWT on the subject of back radiation.

You can believe what you like, y’all obviously enjoy projecting your fantasies onto what you read from me..

..doesn’t alter the fact that none of you fixated on radiation in your empty space ideal gas atmosphere without any sound has absolutely anything relevant to say about the energy budget in the real world.

Eric Adler says that without references there is no way to check whether my statements (which merely repeat those made by Professor Lindzen at a conference at which he and I spoke in Colombia last year) are accurate. In fact, the underlying reference is of course given: it is Wentz et al. (2007), which is mentioned twice in the text. If Mr. Adler had had any difficulty in finding the paper, he had merely to ask me, rather than casting doubt on the accuracy of what I had said.

He also says I do not define “evaporation”. Read Wentz and check with Professor Lindzen.

He also says I do not specify the method by which evaporation affects climate sensitivity. However, my comment was in reply to a question a previous commenter had asked about how Professor Lindzen had reached his climate-sensitivity estimate. I explained that. Again, if Mr. Adler wants further details he should first read Wentz et al. and then approach Professor Lindzen.

Next, Mr. Adler says that I have used the wrong units for heat flux. However, I have of course used the right units. Radiative flux is measured in Watts per square meter; and radiative flux change in response to a given change in temperature – which is what we are dealing with here – is expressed, as I expressed it, in Watts per square meter per Kelvin (the units the IPCC itself uses to express temperature feedbacks, for instance: for they, too, are changes in radiative flux per unit change in temperature). If Mr. Adler is unfamiliar with such units, any standard textbook of climatological physics will be able to assist him.

Then he says I use an Equation (1) that is not shown. However, I have of course shown Equation (1). Hint: it is the first equation shown, and it is labeled (1), in exactly the same fashion as the three subsequent equations appear seriatim and are (perhaps unimaginatively) labeled (2), (3), (4) respectively.

Next, he adds – with the habitual offensiveness that seems to be the hallmark of climate extremists everywhere – that there is no way to make any sense of what I have written. The usual approach is to read it first, to check politely whatever is not clear, and then to think.

He also adds – again with gratuitous impoliteness – that what I have written is “a travesty”. No: what I wrote was a full and careful response to a sensible enquiry from a legitimate and genuinely interested commenter.

He concludes: “I am sure that this comment will not be posted.” Well, it was posted, which is why I am able to reply to it. Frankly, if Mr. Adler had wanted to ask detailed technical questions about what I had written he should simply have gotten in touch with me, rather than writing what looks very much like a baseless but artful attempt at discrediting what I had said, and by implication discrediting Professor Lindzen and Dr. Wentz.

Really? So where’s LaTour’s Nobel Prize? Where’s the experiment? Where is it published?

Myrrh, did you ever ask yourself why Johnson, LaTour, and our own Doug Cotton are content to remain trol–er, voices in the wilderness, when they could revolutionize physics, claim wealth and fame, and silence their critics with one comparatively simple experiment? I mean, doesn’t it make you just the least bit suspicious?

It is always a pleasure to see Lord Monckton debating, and he seems to have outdone himself here. And kudos to Justin for a superb narrative.

Having read the comments, which are mostly supportive, it is depressing to see the same tired, old “violation of 2nd law” postings that appear whenever the phrase “greenhouse gas” is mentioned. It’s like those self styled “physicists” that set up blogs claiming to have proof that Einstein was wrong. Such “proofs”, if they can be dignified by such a term, invariably turn out to be no more than a set of logical statements attempting to establish a contradiction. All the arguments I’ve ever read, fail by the falsity of their own logic.

I’ve posted enough times about why there is no 2nd law violation. I’ve grown tired of it, and I’ll say no more on the subject.

There’s a note (#5 in my Appendix) about microwaves. They primarily heat water and some fats and sugars. The air in the plastic could of course include some WV. The main point is that they do not have much effect on composite blackbodies. The same applies for radio waves which are not absorbed much by the atmosphere or the surface. In fact radio waves support the hypothesis of Claes Johnson that low frequency radiation is not converted to thermal energy by blackbodies at normal Earth temperatures – which generally emit much higher frequencies themselves. Note that 12cm corresponds to spontaneous emission at only 0.0241481 K

And remember, what is called basic traditional science says categorically and unequivocally that heat does not flow from colder to hotter, there is no ‘backradiation’.
___________________________________________

Yes to the first, but “traditional physics” does not say the atmosphere cannot emit radiation in the direction of the Earth’s surface, some of which will reach the surface.

I don’t have time at the moment to follow those links, will get back to this in a couple of days.
==========

Nullius in Verba says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:58 am
“Hmm, well let me put it this way. Show me empirical work and explanations from what you call “basic traditional science” – and, please fetch it. Don’t bother giving any more “thought experiments”, come back with actual proven scientific experiments. And remember, what is called basic traditional science says categorically and unequivocally that heat does not flow from colder to hotter, there is no ‘backradiation’. ”

Oh dear. Is this argument still going on?

Basic traditional science says *categorically* and *unequivocally* that heat *can* flow from colder to hotter, and in an *unrelated* point that backradiation does exist. You have misunderstood the second law – it doesn’t say what you think it says. And scores of people have provided numerous examples, which you just skirt around and then go back to saying what you said before.

The most obvious example of heat flowing from colder to hotter is a refrigerator. The second law says that work has to be done to accomplish it, but it does not say that heat can never flow from colder to hotter. Refrigerators don’t break any laws.

The reason it is still going on is because of people like you mangling the 2nd Law and giving examples which are not relevant – here at least you have mentioned “work has to be done to accomplish it”, which sounds like someone tried to teach you..

Yes it does say that it can’t flow from colder to hotter, because it makes the distinction that this applies to spontaneous heat flow, heat cannot flow from colder to hotter without work being done.

Just as water cannot flow uphill unless work is done to effect such a change.

And as for that poor old chewed blanket, if you lived in a world which had conduction and convection in the atmosphere you could work out for yourself what was happening,

“A more familiar example is a blanket. The blanket is colder than you are, but it still causes your skin temperature to rise when you cover yourself with it.”

No it doesn’t, because immediately the cold blanket will take heat from you, it can slow your heat loss and act to delay conduction of your body’s heat to the cold air around you, which is why you feel cold in the first place, and depending on how cold the air and how effective the blanket, you will hopefully regain your body’s working temperature, and if very efficient, could make you overheat.

But, just how is the trace amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere effective as an insulating blanket? The air is practically 100% not carbon dioxide! Find the blanket!

And, let’s have the figures, how much does this practically non-existing blanket of carbon dioxide actually raise temperature of matter? Surely you must have tons of experiments to prove this? Where are the industries that have incorporated this amazing power of minute quantities of carbon dioxide to raise matter’s temperature? Why isn’t this astonishing breakthrough in understanding in the design of my central heating system? I could save a fortune on fuel costs. Come on, don’t keep it a secret – how do I lag my attic with it? Ooops, already lagged with atmospheric concentrations..

Really? So where’s LaTour’s Nobel Prize? Where’s the experiment? Where is it published?

Myrrh, did you ever ask yourself why Johnson, LaTour, and our own Doug Cotton are content to remain trol–er, voices in the wilderness, when they could revolutionize physics, claim wealth and fame, and silence their critics with one comparatively simple experiment? I mean, doesn’t it make you just the least bit suspicious?

Gary, I first became suspicious when introduced to these warmist backradiation ideas – my very first problem with it was seeing the claimed ‘rise in industrial CO2 driving temperatures’ linked to a temperature rise from, and described as the Earth’s norm, the end of the Little Ice Age and realising the great outpouring from industry didn’t begin until the middle of the last century, maybe you’re too young to remember the few cars being driven on practically empty motorways in rush hour.. and then, I discovered the HokeySchtick shenanigans. My second problem was being astounded to find that I had to believe that carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere for hundreds and even thousands of years – and I found this repeated everywhere as “well known”, and with carbon dioxide blamed for the warming rise out of the LIA because we had increased it – somehow I just couldn’t get my head around how I could be told this at the same time, practically in the same sentence, as being told that this was disruption to the norm and that carbon dioxide levels had been stable for some 400,600,800,000 years previously, so obviously, the rise in carbon dioxide now was the cause of our warming; regardless that this was being graphed from a beginning at the bottom of the LIA and even though the industry supposedly at fault didn’t exist until much, much later, but extraordinarily, regardless also that this showed carbon dioxide was irrelevant to driving temperatures, because, if it had been stable all those hundreds of thousands of years previously, then it had nothing to do with our periodic massive rises in temperatures when gazillions of tons of ice melted and sea levels rose 300′ plus in a short space of time at our entries into the benign conditions of our interglacials, our brief respites from the Ice Age we are still in, and into which we shall return, soon, for another 100,000 years or so.

That’s when I became suspicious, that I was dealing with people who couldn’t keep logically coherent from the beginning to end of one sentence. Then of course, I found it was because they had been fed a diet of tweaked fisics, ideas taken from real physics and mangled by swapping around properties and taking laws out context, and much more, and instead of being able to look objectively at the information they were regurgitating in pre-programmed memes when given an alternative view from the real world, they would tie themselves in knots to come back with some reply or other, straw man and ad hom mostly when they failed, because, the AGW paradigm was all they knew, they had had no reason to distrust it. Didn’t want to distrust it, perhaps.

I was luckier than those, I found no reason to trust it, I had a little real world physics under my belt and could see the incoherence. You can continue to argue for The Greenhouse Effect, but until you can explain how carbon dioxide can drive global warming at the beginning of our interglacials around 800 years before it itself begins increasing – then you are peddling magic, not science.

Lord Monckton:
Thank you for responding (@3/10 – 7:48 p.m.) to my query. I am sorry about the unpleasant little tiff with Eric Adler. I reread Wentz several times today and still have a number of questions, but I should contact Lindzen directly. The Wentz paper does not really address energy fluxes, and so I am still not clear about what the 0.8 W/m^2 per deg.K flux is, e.g., a latent heat flux from the ocean surface into the atmosphere, or from the surface via convection and latent heat release to space, or something in between. Moreover, the large increase in observed evaporation(vs the much smaller increases in the model outputs) is not a simple direct function of increased sea surface temperatures. Changes in global (and especially tropical) wind speeds are crucial. As Wentz et. al. noted, the model atmospheric energy budgets could still balance (in a way pleasing to the warmists) if as the models also predicted global and tropical wind speeds significantly deceased. They did just the opposite! In any event, the unexpected and large observed increases in evaporation and precipitation imply huge heat fluxes away from the surface, fluxes that the models got quite wrong. We have Lindzen & Choi (2011). If with this alternative derivation we have a substantially different way of reaching a similar result, that would be profound. I just want to see it all worked out in detail, step by step.
Again thank you. And BTW, I did so much enjoy your Union College presentation. I am only sorry that neither the lecture nor the Q&A video included the professor asking students to raise their hands and your response to that.

I’m curious about the 33C of average surface temperature contributed by greenhouse gases. It’s an average, so what is its span? Is it a Gaussian distribution? Where are the -3db shoulders? at +/-10%? +/-20%? +/-100%? Does it vary by latitude, i.e., is it greater or less in the polar regions; greater or lesser in the tropical regions? Is it 33C in winter and in summer? Is it constant year around?

While waiting for wise commentary and guidance from the community, I’m still patiently waiting for a reference to Tyndall’s easily replicable experiment that documents omnidirectional warming from stimulated CO2 molecules in the presence of unrestricted convection.

I’m curious about the 33C of average surface temperature contributed by greenhouse gases. It’s an average, so what is its span? Is it a Gaussian distribution? Where are the -3db shoulders? at +/-10%? +/-20%? +/-100%? Does it vary by latitude, i.e., is it greater or less in the polar regions; greater or lesser in the tropical regions? Is it 33C in winter and in summer? Is it constant year around?

Ken: The 33 C figure is derived from looking at the global energy balance, i.e., comparing the actual average surface temperature to the average surface temperature that one would of necessity have to have if the Earth were otherwise the same (in particular, same albedo) but there was no greenhouse effect. As such, it doesn’t give you the answers to your questions and you would have to do more detailed modeling to study how an atmosphere without the greenhouse effect.

The science is really not that hard to understand for those capable of understanding science that conflicts with what their ideology makes them want to believe that the science should say.

Myrrh says (March 11, 2012 at 2:59 pm): “Gary, I first became suspicious when introduced to these warmist backradiation ideas…”

Since you’re not suspicious of fringe physicists’ refusal to support their “theories” with actual experiments–despite very lucrative rewards for doing so–I must conclude you’re extremely gul–er, receptive to new and exciting ideas and opportunities. Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I happen to own several very nice bridg–oh, but I forget, you’ve already bought one. :-)

The heat flux associated with the percentage change ΔE/ΔT in evaporation per 1 K surface warming is (0.8 ΔE/ΔT) W m–2 K–1, and λ is in effect the reciprocal of this heat flux, so that (1) gives consequent transient climate sensitivity in Kelvin:

∆T(2x) = ∆F(2x) λ = ∆F(2x) / (0.8 ∆E/∆T). (1)

As a checksum, we can plug the modeled 3%-per-Kelvin (2) and 1%-per-Kelvin (3) increases in evaporation with warming, as well as the observed 5.7% increase (4), into (1) to determine the warming ∆T(2x) at a doubling of CO2 concentration:

Note that the implicit climate-sensitivity interval from the models (2,3) is [1.6, 4.6] K, which broadly coincides with the interval {1.5, 4.5] K in the IPCC’s 2001 report, and differs little from the [2.0, 4.5] K in the 2007 report. Accordingly, (2,3) show that the model offered by Professor Lindzen is well calibrated.

I see no justifications whatsoever for the claim that “λ is in effect the reciprocal of this heat flux”. You claim such a justification from the coincidence that the 1% to 3% increase in evaporation seen across the models yields a range of climate sensitivities more or less in line with the IPCC range. However, in order to show that this is likely anything more than a happy coincidence, you would have to demonstrate that the models that show a 1% increase are those with sensitivities around 4.5 C and those that show a 3% increase are those with sensitivities around 1.5 C, or in general that there is a good inverse correlation between what the models predict in terms of sensitivity and what they predict in terms of changes in evaporation. Without such evidence, there is nobody likely to believe such numerical coincidences are any indication that your assumption about the relationship between increase in evaporation and sensitivity is justified! Remember, you are talking to an audience that calls themselves “skeptics” here!

In reply to Joel Shore, an earlier commenter had asked me to outline how Professor Lindzen reached a quantitative conclusion, and I replied by providing the quantitative basis and pointing out that application of the value he assigns to lambda seems in line with the IPCC’s interval of climate-sensitivity estimates. If Mr. Shore has any queries about the reason why Professor Lindzen assigns the stated value to lambda, then he should not talk impolitely about “numerical coincidences” or about “my assumption” about the relationship between changes in evaporation and climate sensitivity. I made no such assumption: I merely reported what Professor Lindzen had said and outlined his calculation. I should not be surprised if, in due course, the Professor were to publish a paper on the implications of the remarkably substantial discrepancy between the model-predicted and actually-observed rates of change in surface evaporation per unit change in surface temperature. Yet again, the models’ predictions are shown to be unskilful, and – if the Professor is right – yet again they have erred greatly on the side of exaggerating climate sensitivity.

Lord Monckton has proved to be an effective debater. Usually, the logic of his arguments is impeccable. However, his arguments have a logical weak spot.

While Monckton asserts that the IPCC climate models make “predictions,” they make only “projections” and while the predictions of a model are falsifiable, the projections of a model are not.

The logical fault in the IPCC’s argument for CAGM is not as represented by Monckton. While he represents that this fault lies in inconsistency of the predictions of the models with a global average surface air temperature time serties, the fault truely lies in our inability to statistically test the projections of these models.

The science is really not that hard to understand for those capable of understanding science that conflicts with what their ideology makes them want to believe that the science should say.
_______________________________________

Indeed Joel. What is it that makes it hard for yourself to understand that the adiabatic lapse rate determines how much warmer the surface is than the mean temperature of the Earth-plus-atmosphere system, which is not particularly close to 255K by the way, but would be found somewhere in the troposphere, stratosphere or mesosphere. I’m sure you will also find that this lapse rate would be the same for an 80% pure nitrogen and 20% pure oxygen atmosphere, because such lapse rate is a function of the acceleration due to gravity. Does this conflict with your own ideology, Joel?

Mr. Oldberg draws what seems a largely artificial distinction between “prediction” and “projection”. Any prediction or projection that is not falsifiable does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis: it is simply a guess.

Here are just some of the predictions (or projections, or forecasts, or rune-riddlings, or tea-leaf readings, or entrail-inspections, or magpie-countings) of the IPCC and its devotees that have gone agley:

The IPCC predicts, as its central estimate, 1.5 K warming by 2100 because of the CO2 we add this century, with another 0.6 K for “already-committed” warming and 0.7 K for warming from non-CO2 greenhouse gases: total 2.8 K (the mean of the predictions on all six emissions scenarios). Of this 2.8 K, 0.2 K should have occurred since 2000, but the outturn is 0.0 K.

The IPCC predicts 2.8 K manmade warming from 2000-2100, but the warming from 1950-2010 was equivalent to just 1.2 K/century. There will need to be much acceleration of warming to reach the IPCC’s prediction. The required acceleration is most unlikely because each additional molecule of CO2 has less warming effect than its predecessor, and because …

The IPCC predicts that the anthropogenic fraction of CO2 will rise exponentially this century, yet in the past decade the rate of increase in CO2 concentration has been falling.

The IPCC’s central estimate of CO2 concentration by 2100 is 713 ppmv, but on current trends there will be no more than 590 ppmv in the atmosphere by then.

The IPCC’s predicted rate of increase in ocean heat content over the past decade or two has proven to be four and a half times greater than the observed rate of increase.

The IPCC predicts a 1ft-2ft sea-level rise by 2100, with a best estimate 1ft 5in. Yet for the past eight years sea level has been rising at a rate equivalent to just 1.3 inches per century, and sea level last year was lower than in any of the previous seven years.

Al Gore, in 2005, predicted an imminent sea-level rise of 20 ft. Yet the same year he spent $4 million buying a swank condo in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the allegedly-rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf.

James Hansen, in 2010, wrote an article in the British Marxist daily newspaper The Guardian saying that because of Man’s activities sea level would eventually rise by 246 feet (he called it 75 meters). There is no basis in the sea-level data for any such prediction.

The IPCC’s prediction that hurricanes would increase their intensity, frequency, and duration as a result of “global warming” has failed. In the past year, the Accumulated Cyclone-Energy Index was at its least in the 30-year satellite record, notwithstanding the net global warming over the period.

The UN, a few years ago, confidently predicted that there would be 50 million climate refugees by 2010. There weren’t and aren’t.

Bottom line: It. Isn’t. Happening. I don’t care whether the predictions are called projections: they are wrong. Just about all of the failed predictions have erred extravagantly on the side of exaggeration. The models don’t work because a) their continuing tendency to exaggerate beyond reason indicates prejudice on the part of those who are supplying them with data; and b) “the climate is a coupled, non-linear chaotic object”, and, therefore, “the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible” (IPCC, 2001, para. 14.2.2.2). The best the IPCC says it can do is a probability distribution: but it can’t. Time to shut it down for aye.

Sarah J says:
March 10, 2012 at 4:34 am
If the guy who wrote that is meant to be a journalist he should be ashamed … Hideous bias, and maligning of those whose point of view he doesn’t agree with. My mind feels dirty just having read it.

Well Sarah. I say we smear our bodies with CO2 and have some seriously dirty fun. You up for it?

I think it is very difficult to assess increased evaporation from warming.
For example, if I leave the pump of my swimming pool off during the day (light) and at the end of that day I dive in the pool, I find that there is a layer of warm water lying on top. This is because water absorbs in the (hot) IR and this is being re-radiated in the top layers of the water. Needless to say that evaporation increases as the temp. of the water increases. So the evaporation all depends on how the top layers are mixed or not mixed. The only way it might be possible to assess the increase in evaporation is to pair the increase in temps. with that of the observed increased rainfall.

Most people, including myself and Spencer, estimate the (“global” ) warming during the past 38 years at about 0,14 degrees C per decade. That is about 0,56 degrees in total for the past 4 decades. As stated before, the results of my 22 odd weather stations indicate an average increase in rainfall 1.5 mm per month/decade. This is about 6 mm per month extra.
So for one degree warming I estimate that rainfall will increase by ca. 10 mm.

Mind you, for some rerason(s) that I still have to figure out, humidity decreased over the same period, by about 0,2% RH/decade, globally.
This observation confirms the red lines in Fig. 3.38 of the relevant IPCC report, showing that warmer nights have been decreasing and colder nights have been increasing (since 1979). So, overall there is more natural warming caused by increasing maxima causing more evaporation and more condensation, at the same time.

Allow me to add my voice to the chorus of thanks for Lord Monckton’s always calm, gracious, and reasoned essays. There are many realists doing an excellent job of punching holes in this vast scam, such as Anthony and Steve McIntyre; and some welcome apostates like Judith Curry, but I believe when it comes to winning converts, no one has been as effective as Christopher Monckton.

Plus, I love that he used “agley” – hadn’t come across that since H.S. English Lit & good old Bobby Burns:

Fact Check.
Gore’s Condo in the St Regis is more than a kilometer from the San Francisco Bay, more than 3 km from Fisherman’s Wharf, not “just feet away” unless you mean over 10,000 feet. It’s more than 10 km from the Pacific Ocean.
The base of the building is 65 feet above sea level, where I think the confusion may come from.

We need to get Lord Monckton to do another tour of Australia. We urgently need his common-sense here. If we could persaude Professor Lindzen to do one with him as well,that would be the ideal team so to speak.

Mr. Oldberg draws what seems a largely artificial distinction between “prediction” and “projection”. Any prediction or projection that is not falsifiable does not qualify as a scientific hypothesis: it is simply a guess.

————-

Monckton of Brenchley,

Thank you once again for a remarkable open dialog. Independent thinking is the unstoppable intellectual element in the dialog critical of the manipulated ‘science’ of IPCC centric CAGWist’s.

Falsifiability is not the most important scientifically focused restraint on a ‘prediction’ or ‘projection’ or ‘guess’. Falsifiability has necessary epistemological precursors.

The most important scientifically focused restraint on a ‘prediction’ or ‘projection’ or ‘guess’ is that the basis of making one (prediction/projection/guess) includes the statement of relevant reasonably identifiable metaphysical entities that are the means/focus of what is being predicted/projected/guessed. Makin the entities up arbitrarily to support an argument is insufficient scientifically.

Some much better examples of this lecture can be seen at the UKIP Scotland website, repost of this story, which has extra information and alternative recordings of this Monckton Lecture. There are two alternative videos and even a low bandwidth slides/audio presentation.

Firstly there is a near identical lecture given at Minnesota on the 8th March, and secondly there is the very similar lecture given at Hartford on the 3rd March. The Minnesota version is an 8-part YouTube presentation lasting for about 100 minutes, and the Hartford version is a continuous slides and broadband video presentation, in a special “Echo Player” flash applet.

Furthermore, the Hartford Echo Player (as recommended by Lord Monckton himself) does afford an opportunity for those with limited bandwidth, or in network congested areas to view an audio only presentation accompanied by high quality slides, as used in teh actual lecture, and using the sound track from the actual lecture. Many educationalists will find this latter example invaluable I am sure.

“Eric Adler says that without references there is no way to check whether my statements (which merely repeat those made by Professor Lindzen at a conference at which he and I spoke in Colombia last year) are accurate. In fact, the underlying reference is of course given: it is Wentz et al. (2007), which is mentioned twice in the text. If Mr. Adler had had any difficulty in finding the paper, he had merely to ask me, rather than casting doubt on the accuracy of what I had said.”

Since I wrote that post, I did some searching and found the paper by Wentz to which you referred. From this paper it seems that evaporation meant evaporation rate. Doing some further digging, it seems that Wentz made an assumption in his analysis that is probably not valid .

“Absrtact: Wentz et al. (Reports, 13 July 2007, p. 233) present a satellite estimate of
global-mean rainfall that increases with global warming faster than predicted
by climate models. An independent estimate of global-mean evaporation provides
additional support, but critical assumptions on relative humidity and the
air-sea temperature difference changes are made that do not have adequate
observational basis and are inconsistent with climate models.”

In the text, the authors point out that the all models do not assume a reduction in wind speed contrary to what Wentz said in his paper. Also Wentz neglects the fact that small changes in relative humidity or difference between surface and near air temperatures can result in large changes in evaporation rates based on their equation (1) which determines evaporation rate. Wentz assumed that the wind speed change was the sole determining factor affecting evaporation rates.

Another paper criticized Wentz’s analysis because he did not consider other factors which play a role in precipitation such as global brightening during the period of study; and the error bars in Wentz’s estimate of the evaporation rate increase was considerable.
:

For these reasons, one shouldn’t put much faith in the argument that estimates of evaporation rate changes, with temperature, show that the climate sensitivity is as low as Lindzen and Monckton are claiming.

Thank you for taking the time to reply. It is easy to discriminate models that make predictions from models that make only projections, for a statistical population underlies the former type of model but not the latter. If you were to search for the population underlying the models cited by IPCC Working Group 1 in AR4 you’d search in vain, for there isn’t one.

The statistical testing of a predictive model features a comparison of predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the various possible outcomes in the observed events that belong to a statistical sample which was drawn from the underlying population. If there is a match between the predicted and observed relative frequencies with respect to each possible outcome, the model is said to be “validated” by the statistical evidence. Otherwise, it is said to be “falsified” by this evidence. Obviously, this process cannot take place in the absence of the underlying population. As it cannot take place, claims made on the basis of Working Group 1’s models are not falsifiable thus lying outside science.

This state of affairs is obscured by a use of language in the climatological literature in which terms make ambiguous reference to the associated ideas with consequential negation of Aristotle’s law of non-contradiction. In its argument for the existence of CAGW, Working Group 1 employs the negated law as a false premise thusly arriving at the conclusion that CAGW is proved when it is not proved on account of the false premise.

From early in his Union College talk last week we have (by my transcription of his talk-JW):

Monckton of Brenchley said

“ [ . . . ] Therefore it is likely, though not yet definitive, that some of the warming over the last 60 years, perhaps even over half of it as the IPCC said, may have been caused by us. [ . . . ]”

I support the position of it being “not yet definitive” that CO2 has had any significant impact on warming over the period Monckton of Brenchley mentioned.

The science needed in that area is not yet started and any that has been done was not objectively treated by IPCC centric processes. The lack of that independent science over the past 20+ years was due primarily to:

1) Overwhelming bias toward CAGW funding,

2) Broad manipulation against independent (skeptical) scientists. Just one of several examples that manipulation is the well documented activity of the group of IPCC centric scientists shown in CG1 & CG2.

3) The intellectual dishonesty and lack of ethical integrity shown by an almost complete boycott by MSM of objective balance in climate science reporting,

4) NGO’s providing incredibly large amounts of money for PR to media and governments to feed the radical ideology of CAGWism.

We have just begun the era in climate science where objective and balanced dialog will focus on how much warming is from mankind’s emission of CO2. We see, in this new era, only the beginning of the additional necessary independent (skeptical) science now.

Regarding everyone making claims as to definitive amounts of the warming from man’s CO2, they serve no actual scientific contribution at this time; the claims are instead just open commentary in the face of insufficient independent (skeptical) science so far. I am not against open commentary, it is needed but it is not science per se.

In response to the childish and malevolently-expressed comment of whoever lurks under the cowardly pseudonym “Wombat”, I did not “make up” anything about Dr. Pinker’s paper of 2005. I pointed out, correctly, that she had identified a naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 that had exercised a radiative forcing of some 6 Watts per square meter. And I drew the not unreasonable conclusion (which I did not attribute to her) that after deducting the naturally-caused radiative forcing from the reduction in cloud cover the anthropogenic component in climate sensitivity over the period was likely to have been considerably less than the IPCC had imagined.

I say my conclusion was “not unreasonable” because Dr. Scafetta, in a posting at WattsUpWithThat today, has also concluded that, once the natural 60-year cycles of the great ocean oscillations are accounted for (and it may be these cycles that express themselves in changes in cloud cover such as that which Dr. Pinker had identified), the anthropogenic component in global warming is considerably less than the IPCC imagines.

The unspeakable BBC, looking desperately for ways to discredit me in a documentary entitled “Meet The Sceptics” that it broadcast last year, sent Dr. Pinker a copy of a paper on the cloud-cover issue and its implications for climate sensitivity that I had presented at the annual seminar on planetary emergencies held by the World Federation of Scientists in Erice, Sicily. From their outright refusal to show me her letter in response, and from their failure to include any mention of the issue in their documentary, one deduces that she did not find too much to complain about in my actually entirely straightforward presentation of her conclusions. She may or may not have agreed with the inferences I drew from those conclusions: but I did not “make up” the conclusions, and the suggestion that I did is libel.

My paper is now published in the official Proceedings of the seminar, and a development of it, with a distinguished analysis of Dr. Pinker’s data by Dr. Joseph Boston, was later also published as a chapter in the book “Evidence-Based Climate Science”, edited by Don Easterbrook.

It would surely be more constructive if the likes of Wombat (whoever he or she may be) were to read the source material and think about it rather than carelessly and libelously parroting the climate-extremists’ party line. In this instance, the party line is derived from a misdescription of of what I had said by a climate-extremist blogger in an email to Dr. Pinker, who had understandably replied that my remarks as deliberately misdescribed by the blogger did not reflect what she had said in her paper.

This questionable technique proved so damaging to my reputation that it was later serially adopted by “Professor” Abraham in a howlingly mendacious personal attack on me broadcast by the fourteenth-rate bible college where he “teaches”. As a result, scientists all over the place are saying I misrepresented their work, when the worst that could fairly be said is that I drew conclusions from it with which they found it expedient or profitable to disagree. For these reasons, I have seen no reason to “change my tune” on Dr. Pinker’s paper: on the contrary, my “tune” is now to be found in the scientific literature.

If Mr. Shore has any queries about the reason why Professor Lindzen assigns the stated value to lambda, then he should not talk impolitely about “numerical coincidences” or about “my assumption” about the relationship between changes in evaporation and climate sensitivity. I made no such assumption: I merely reported what Professor Lindzen had said and outlined his calculation.

Dr. Pinker responded multiple times to you misrepresentation of her work including, I believe, your error riddled testimony before the US congressional committee. And the BBC could have dedicated their entire documentary on your array of disinformation, but their scope wasn’t that narrow. You “make up” your own conclusions regularly while disregarding those of paper authors. Mr. Abraham, Mr. Hadfield, and others have exposed your reprehensible disinformation techniques, Mr. Monckton. We’re still waiting for your promised point-by-point engagement with Mr. Hadfield, which was supposed to take place upon return from your last trip. As Mr. Hadfield documented so well, your “tune” changes so frequently as to recommend DJ as your next profession.

REPLY: I think this is a job for…SuperMandia! (Abraham’s cohort on the CRRT) – A

I think your remarks to Lord Monckton are insulting and without any scientific substance or evidence.
WUWT is a public forum and here we ask you to rather bring (scientific) evidence of your claims so that we can all peek in on it. You will find that we deal very harshly with people calling names and making insulting remarks. We despise people like you.
I should tell you that my own evidence collected over the past two years clearly proves that the warming of the past 4 decades was natural or largely natural and I challenge you to prove to me (considering at least as many data as went past my eyes) that the warming over the past 4 decades was largely not natural.

I know Richard Lindzen’s track-record so I trust what he says unless and until shown he has made an error.

And I know the track-record of RealClimate. So, if RealClimate disagrees with Lindzen (you assert they do) then that can only be taken as confirmatory evidence that Lindzen is right.

Evan Green:

Your rant is not capable of rational response because it fails to provide a single point, substantiated claim and/or item of evidence. It consists entirely of offensive, unsupported assertions such as;
“your error riddled testimony before the US congressional committee.”

There is a word for contributions such as yours. It is ‘twaddle’.

Please provide a post that makes a proper point or go away. Mindless distractions such as your contribution waste time reading them.

I know Richard Lindzen’s track-record so I trust what he says unless and until shown he has made an error.

And I know the track-record of RealClimate. So, if RealClimate disagrees with Lindzen (you assert they do) then that can only be taken as confirmatory evidence that Lindzen is right.

So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say. (By the way, it is not hard to verify that RC is correct on the particular point in question that I provided as an example.)

I honestly I can’t say that I am at all surprised, but it is still interesting to have it so directly confirmed.

@Monckton of Brenchley says: March 12, 2012 at 9:04 am
Dr. Pinker responded multiple times to you misrepresentation of her work including…
———————————————————
Are you daft, or perhaps pixalated? Monckton clearly stated , “I pointed out, correctly, that she had identified a naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 that had exercised a radiative forcing of some 6 Watts per square meter. And I drew the not unreasonable conclusion (which I did not attribute to her) that after deducting the naturally-caused radiative forcing from the reduction in cloud cover the anthropogenic component in climate sensitivity over the period was likely to have been considerably less than the IPCC had imagined.”

He also clearly stated, “…the party line is derived from a misdescription of what I had said by a climate-extremist blogger in an email to Dr. Pinker, who had understandably replied that my remarks as deliberately misdescribed by the blogger did not reflect what she had said in her paper.”

In other words, another mendacious CAGW proponent ‘Gleicked” him. As his comment was almost two hours before your baseless rant, which did not addresss his real points, you remarks fit right in with Gleick, and mendacious Mann. Both your Mom and I are very disappointed in your actions.

“So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say.”
========================================================

Well Joel, perhaps you should look in a mirror as you defend most everything Mann and Hansen do, including the Hockey stick and the recent new wild predictions of accelerating Sea Level rise.
Not even the team, in their e-nails support the historic proxy climate reconstructions, in private condemming Mann’s work, calling it the garbage it is, and admitting that even if they did their best work of all the proxy papers, they know “[SNIP] all” about past climate. Lindzen always responds cogently to criticisms, which his last paper well addressed, unlike the unscientific team members.
So unfortunately for you, when you defend the indefensible, and attack a very honorable honest scientist who’s papers you are not qualified to carry, your credibility is in fact justly reduced to the company you keep.

“So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say.”
================================
Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Joel Shore, yet again, cannot resist crude, impolite sniping that adds no ornament to the debate. He had already been warned on this thread that when I had earlier answered a legitimate question from a commenter far more polite and sensible than he, I had replied with a straightforward account of how Professor Lindzen, in a talk that he had given under my chairmanship at the Houses of Parliament, had calculated that if the increase in evaporation from the Earth’s surface with warming was thrice that which the models predicted then climate sensitivity was one-third of that which the models predicted.

Yet Mr. Shore, ridiculously, writes: “Fine…So your claim is based on a completely unsubstantiated claim by Lindzen.” By now it will be self-evident to the meanest intelligence, and will in due course be self-evident even to Mr. Shore (if we do him the kindness of assuming that he was not fully aware of the position from the outset) that I had made no “claim”. I had merely given a straightforward, quantitative answer to a straightforward, quantitative question not about any presentation by me but about a presentation given by Professor Lindzen, because the questioner knew that I had been at the meeting at which Professor Lindzen had spoken and that I might be able to answer.

If Mr. Shore disagrees with Professor Lindzen on this point, then it is most inappropriate for him to make an unpleasant and unscientific personal attack on the Professor, as he has in this thread. Instead, he should privately contact the Professor, obtain clarification of any points that my own fumbling attempt at an account of his opinion may have left obscure, discuss the science with him in a straightforward fashion, and then think before shooting his mouth off.

I am beginning to get the impression that Mr. Shore, and too many others like him, are deliberately venting their untutored and ignorant malevolence here, over and over again, with less and less scientific credibility, not so much because they want to silence the likes of Professor Lindzen (they know that all their venom cannot do that to so brave a man who has endured their snarling viciousness so imperturbably for so long) but because they and their political allies on the climate-extremist hard Left want to frighten off anyone else who dares to question the IPCC/RealClimate storyline so that they are deterred from saying anything publicly for fear of being mistreated and abused and hollered at and smeared in a similar fashion.

Frankly, it is time that this sort of systematic, organized (and, in some quarters, paid: one thinks of the convicted internet-banking fraudster Lefevre’s funding of the paid PR hacks at Desmogblog, for instance) bullying were made a criminal offense. Science cannot advance while the likes of Mr. Shore behave with such poisonous, mean-spirited, anti-scientific intolerance towards those eminent scientists who, for sound reasons of physics and mathematics, do not share their faith.

Joel Shore’s comment is a corrollary of: Fen’s Law:“The Left believes none of the things they lecture the rest of us about.”

In Joel Shore’s case, he incessantly charges those he disagrees with, with having an “ideology” [used twice in his comment above], being “ideologues”, etc. That’s what passes for science inside Joel Shore’s head.

Shore is motivated entirely by the debunked CAGW politics he continues to flog, and his ‘science’ is simply a veneer used to cover that repeatedly falsified conjecture.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen instead to what the ultimate Authority, planet earth, is saying.

. . .

And Evan Green, surely you must be aware that the Potholer doesn’t have the cojones to stand toe to toe with Lord Monckton and debate the science. Instead he hides out and makes his cherry-picked, ad hominem propaganda videos. Only a fool would accept them at face value. Only a fool.

Brilliant writing, Mr Pulliam – thanks!
And to those, such as Don S, who think that ‘those who can’t, teach’ – try teaching a class of healthy 14-yr-old boys inside on a hot day when they want to be outside doing something/anything else.
Lord Monckton is, in my view, the quintessential teacher and us Sceptics are damn’ lucky he’s on the side of honesty and reason.

And Evan Green, surely you must be aware that the Potholer doesn’t have the cojones to stand toe to toe with Lord Monckton and debate the science. Instead he hides out and makes his cherry-picked, ad hominem propaganda videos. Only a fool would accept them at face value. Only a fool.

I hope you do understand that a thread was setup for direct engagement between Mr. Hadfield and Mr. Monckton right here at WUWT. It wasn’t Mr. Hadfield who tucked-tail and scurried away. This apparently left Mr. Watts no choice but to signal Monckton’s true courage level by closing comments.

Most grateful to UKIP Scotland for explaining where various versions of my lecture can be seen. For the fullest version (not for the faint-hearted: it’s 100 minutes, followed by questions), watch the Hartford University talk, which has the slides incorporated into it.

And, finally, many thanks to Justin Pulliam for having looked after me so effectively during the East Coast leg of my US tour. The article that stands in his name (as Their Lordships say it) has gone viral all over the Web.

On to Canada, to give the annual Nerenberg Lecture on Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario (watch this space). Then back to the US to face the Democrat-controlled State Assemblies of California and of Colorado. No peace for the wicked!

It is not impolite sniping to ask a legitimate question about a claim that is being discussed here by Prof. Lindzen that to me seems quite extraordinary…A claim that seems to imply that basically all that we need to know to determine the climate sensitivity is how rapidly evaporation increases with warming.

Yet Mr. Shore, ridiculously, writes: “Fine…So your claim is based on a completely unsubstantiated claim by Lindzen.” By now it will be self-evident to the meanest intelligence, and will in due course be self-evident even to Mr. Shore (if we do him the kindness of assuming that he was not fully aware of the position from the outset) that I had made no “claim”. I had merely given a straightforward, quantitative answer to a straightforward, quantitative question not about any presentation by me but about a presentation given by Professor Lindzen, because the questioner knew that I had been at the meeting at which Professor Lindzen had spoken and that I might be able to answer.

I had not fully read the entire train of comments that caused you to discuss this claim by Prof. Lindzen. If this is truly a claim for lower climate sensitivity that you have not yourself put forward in any of your writings or speeches, then I apologize for my incorrect inference that it is a claim that you have made.

If Mr. Shore disagrees with Professor Lindzen on this point, then it is most inappropriate for him to make an unpleasant and unscientific personal attack on the Professor, as he has in this thread.

It was hardly a personal attack to note how another recent scientific claim by Lindzen had been found to be incorrect and to suggest that people who consider themselves skeptical might actually want some reasonable evidence to support another, quite extraordinary, claim that Lindzen is making.

I am beginning to get the impression that Mr. Shore, and too many others like him, are deliberately venting their untutored and ignorant malevolence here, over and over again, with less and less scientific credibility, not so much because they want to silence the likes of Professor Lindzen (they know that all their venom cannot do that to so brave a man who has endured their snarling viciousness so imperturbably for so long) but because they and their political allies on the climate-extremist hard Left want to frighten off anyone else who dares to question the IPCC/RealClimate storyline so that they are deterred from saying anything publicly for fear of being mistreated and abused and hollered at and smeared in a similar fashion.

Have you read what some of the people around here have said about scientists like Jim Hansen, Michael Mann, Gavin Schmidt, and others?!? I hardly think that my noting a particular recent instance regarding one of Lindzen’s recent scientific claims and suggesting that one might want to actually have evidence to back up the claim constitutes “abuse” or “smear” or “holler[ing]”. In fact, my treatment of Lindzen was extremely mild…I did not suggest he was a fraud or that he was an incompetent scientist, as people regularly do here in regards to the scientists I mentioned above, and in fact I wouldn’t do that. I have not suggested that he should be hauled before a Congressional committee or that a state attorney general should pursue a witch-hunt against him, nor would I.

Heck, on this very website, I have noted before that I myself am quite skeptical of Jim Hansen’s recent claims that if we really go to town burning fossil fuels then we could / likely would trigger a true Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. And, I have said that I would like to see him present more details and evidence to back up this claim. That is what being a good skeptic is all about…It is about being skeptical even of claims that you might be predisposed to believe because of whatever biases or preconceptions you might bring to the discussion.

Science cannot advance while the likes of Mr. Shore behave with such poisonous, mean-spirited, anti-scientific intolerance towards those eminent scientists who, for sound reasons of physics and mathematics, do not share their faith.

Science cannot advance if we don’t subject all scientific notions to scrutiny, including notions that might suit our fancy. It is hardly “poisonous, mean-spirited, anti-scientific intolerance” to be critical of quite extraordinary claims that, to my knowledge, have not been supported by significant evidence.

I know Richard Lindzen’s track-record so I trust what he says unless and until shown he has made an error.

And I know the track-record of RealClimate. So, if RealClimate disagrees with Lindzen (you assert they do) then that can only be taken as confirmatory evidence that Lindzen is right.”

So, apparently Richard S Courtney’s definition of skepticism is to disbelieve anything that sources that he is ideologically opposed to say and believe anything that sources that he is in ideologically in agreement with say. (By the way, it is not hard to verify that RC is correct on the particular point in question that I provided as an example.)

I honestly I can’t say that I am at all surprised, but it is still interesting to have it so directly confirmed.
——————————

So, you state you do not understand the difference between
(a) Recognition of the track-record of a pack of liars
and
(b) Ideology.
Nobody could say they are surprised, but it is still interesting to have it so directly confirmed.

Unfortunately Lindzen at the meeting chaired by Monckton at the Palace of Westminster accused GISS of manipulating data to show a false trend. On further investigation it transpired that Lindzen’s source had made a mistake and no such manipulation had taken place! Lindzen has since apologized for his mistake.

“You know everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”
Will Rogers, New York Times Aug. 31 1924
US humorist & showman (1879 – 1935)

I’m thankful that there are so many here, including Monckton of Brenchley, that are not ignorant of the composition of the wool that Goraphiles are trying to pull over our eyes so they can pick our pockets while they restrict our freedoms.

The scurrying away is always done by the testosterone-deficient alarmist crowd like pothole and Abraham, who cherry-pick what they want to broadcast, but never have the balls to go toe to toe with Lord Monckton in a real, honest, moderated debate. Why not?

The answer: because ad hominem attacks are easy and cowardly, therefore the alarmist contingent adopts those tactics. Yes, you are cowardly. All of you, from the reprehensible charlatan Michael Mann all the way down to… you.

Prove me wrong. Get Michaerl Mann, or Abraham, or pothole, or anyone else you choose, to agree to a real, honest debate with Lord Monckton. Cherry-picked drive-by hit pieces are not debates, they are not science, and they only happen because your side lacks the huevos to debate the science, and fears giving someone the opportunity to respond in front of a live audience to the pseudo-science emitted by alarmist numpties. You wouldn’t know the scientific method if it bit you on the a …nkle. But the audience would see who is knowledgable, and who is winging it. And via YouTube, the world would see real scientific knowledge pitted against numpties.

So let’s have you or one of your ilk set that debate up. If you have what it takes. From where I’m standing, you are just trying to stack the deck with your usual cherry-picked attacks. In a real, moderated debate, you wouldn’t get away with attacking the man. There would be a specific debate question, and it would be limited to science, not character assassination — which is all you’ve got.

That’s why the alarmist side consistently loses the debates: they rely on pseudo-science to back their CAGW nonsense, and scientific skeptics easily corner them by saying: “It’s your conjecture; prove it.” Show us that runaway global warming. Where is it? Show us that mythical hidden heat in the pipeline. Where is it? Show us that your scary belief system is anything but nonsense. But you can’t. That’s why you lose all the debates, and that’s why you’re scared to death of a real debate.

So prove me wrong. Get the charlatans you’re carrying water for to stand and deliver. Prediction: they’ll run and hide instead, hoping their water boys will keep taking potshots from the sidelines. Despicable and cowardly, but that’s what we’ve come to expect from the gang that’s afraid of a real debate.

Slowly, the truth makes progress. Joel Shore now admits, at last, that he had not taken the trouble to read this thread before accusing me of having made a “claim” that I had not made. Yet he remains insufficiently self-critical to be aware that the language in which he criticized Professor Lindzen is not acceptable. If, despite repeated warnings, he continues to write in such a malevolent tone, he must not be surprised if fewer and fewer people here pay any regard to anything he has to say. No one objects to reasoned debate on scientific matters, or to questioning of scientists’ conclusions, however eminent the scientists may be: but I am by no means the only one to have warned Mr. Shore that his manner of conducting discussion is inappropriate, petulant, and childish, and, therefore, valueless.

Lord Monckton, I pointed out to him at least two years ago that his modus operandi, basically made him a non-scientist. He got stuff published in minor journals to make out like he was capable of doing research. Naaaah.

If you follow his posts for the last year or two, you will see that he is incapable of learning the basics of not starting with the conclusion, something that would not allow conferring a Ph.D. where I studied.

It goes like this:

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, so therefore it must cause cAGW, i.e. THE conclusion

Lord Monckton your insight on the truth is a breath of fresh air,so to speak,among the daily lies that we usually hear from the Gillard-led government. We desperately need more people speaking out on this subject. I ask,please would you consider another tour in Australia lecturing on this,as all forms of government here seem to be joining in on this idioticy,to our great dismay..

Joel Shore says, “Heck, on this very website, I have noted before that I myself am quite skeptical of Jim Hansen’s recent claims that if we really go to town burning fossil fuels then we could / likely would trigger a true Venus-like runaway greenhouse effect. And, I have said that I would like to see him present more details and evidence to back up this claim.”
————————————————————————————————–
Actually Joel, you were defending Hansen’s insane claims of disasterous impending Sea level rise, contrary to all observed evidence. Yes, later you bravely voiced a thought of the need for more evidence. As their is zero evidence of Hansen[s insane propaganda, you demeen yourself by your several posts “defending the indefensible.” But here you out do yourself by comparing Hansen’s outrageous predictions to some minor criticisms of Lindzen, which he addressed in his subsequent paper. What Lindzen did was open science, and happens all the time as science progresses. There is no shame in not being perfect. The end result is still a paper that clearly demonstrates that the earth is conforming to a far lower senstivity then the models predict. On the other hand the projected positive feedbacks you support, which are COMPLETELY theoretical, depend on the LEAST understood aspects of the affect of water vapor and cloud formation, so the strong feedbacks PROJECTED are the least dependable, while the “OBSERVATIONS” used by Lindzen, Spencer, and others, support the lower estimates of climate sensitivity. Additional peer reviewed studies support stronger solar influences on albedo and cloud formation then previously projected, further supporting lower sensitivity. These studies are reinforced by OBSERVATIONS. Other papers have demonstrated that observations of the oceans as well as the trophsphere indicate that the models vastly overstate climate senstivity.

If Dr. Lindzen did any of the following, then your demeaning remarks may be justified. The scientist you support, have done all of the following…
From the National Association of Scholars website:
“How to detect an obvious fraud:
If a researcher will not show their raw data.
If a researcher will not show the “adjustments” they have made to their raw data.
If the researchers historical “adjusted data” conflict rather dramatically with other generally accepted data sets without any rational explanation.
If a researcher will not show the internals of the model that processes their adjusted data to produce their results.
If a researcher attempts to destroy anybody who disagrees with them, instead of attempting to refute their position.
If a researcher attempts to destroy their raw data/adjustments/models rather than have them released.
If a researcher attempts to destroy their communications with other researchers rather than have them released.”

Dr Lindzen, not guilty, The CAGW team, guilty as charged. This verdict, the world will reach.

Does anybody remember James Cameron ( Avatar guy ) doing a slow lateral Arabesque to get out of debating skeptics a while back?

That is the calibre of so many of these believers . . they swan around pretending they have a clue when all they have are emotions. Watching our very own little clique of believers here reminds me of his mega swerve. Sniping without result because they have no clue.

Let’s see Mann or Jones or Hansen go up against a real skeptic, in public live. I would nominate Lord Monckton to put the skeptic argument forward but there are many others, all grounded in science. Let’s see if the warmists Avatar up too.

“Unfortunately Lindzen at the meeting chaired by Monckton at the Palace of Westminster accused GISS of manipulating data to show a false trend. On further investigation it transpired that Lindzen’s source had made a mistake and no such manipulation had taken place! Lindzen has since apologized for his mistake.”

I do NOT believe you!

GISS and Hadley frequently alter historical temperature data. I was Lead Author of a paper which analysed that data and was prevented from publication by these changes: the data kept changing between submission of the paper and publication.

These data changes were the subject of the email from me that was leaked by the Climategate whistleblower and, therefore, they – and how they prevented the paper’s publication – was the subject of my submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry that whitewashed the nefarious ‘Team’. The nature of the data changes is explained in that submission.

Provide evidence for your assertions or apologise. On face value your assertions are merely another set of lies and smears from an anonymous internet troll who promotes the AGW scare.

[it was automatically directed to the spam bin as it contains words or phrases that may be indicative of fraud or automated trolling, this happens quite often but as the blog is moderated this automated trapping can be corrected by an actual human. Sometimes it takes a bit longer than you might wish for reasons of staffing or workload but you need not fear that it will be deleted if it is not fraudulent or spam. That being said mistakes do happen so please do continue to alert us when you feel a post has gone into the delete bin inadvertently . . kbmod]

It said;

Phil:

At March 12, 2012 at 7:18 pm you assert:

“Unfortunately Lindzen at the meeting chaired by Monckton at the Palace of Westminster accused GISS of manipulating data to show a false trend. On further investigation it transpired that Lindzen’s source had made a mistake and no such manipulation had taken place! Lindzen has since apologized for his mistake.”

I do NOT believe you!

GISS and Hadley frequently alter historical temperature data. I was Lead Author of a paper which analysed that data and was prevented from publication by these changes: the data kept changing between submission of the paper and publication.

These data changes were the subject of the email from me that was leaked by the Climategate whistleblower and, therefore, they – and how they prevented the paper’s publication – was the subject of my submission to the Parliamentary Select Committee enquiry that whitewashed the nefarious ‘Team’. The nature of the data changes is explained in that submission.

Provide evidence for your assertions or apologise. On face value your assertions are merely another set of lies and smears from an anonymous internet troll who promotes the AGW scare.

Richard S Courtney says:
March 13, 2012 at 2:36 am
==========================================================
Thank you Richard, however most now never think for a moment that their words are true. Little Peter Gleicks in training is what I see, taking innoncent minutiae of facts, and spinning an completely artificial air of nefarious motive behind it.

I hope you do understand that a thread was setup for direct engagement between Mr. Hadfield and Mr. Monckton right here at WUWT. It wasn’t Mr. Hadfield who tucked-tail and scurried away. This apparently left Mr. Watts no choice but to signal Monckton’s true courage level by closing comments.

Henry@Evan
Mr. Green, after insulting Lord Monckton, I had asked you to produce some test results from tests or observations that you had obtained yourself that would somehow prove to me (us) that modern warming (i.e. the warming observed in the past 4 decades) was not natural or largely not natural. You have done no such thing. That leaves us all to conclude that you are an ……?

Anyway, the best way to a good debate/discussion between the “believers” and “unbelievers” would be for each side to chose a representative and then for a scientific journal or magazine to produce a set of questions to which each representative must give his/her own answers. In that way, each side can have some time to consider each question and give good reasoned answers, backed by good (time consuming) thought processes and referenced by good research, if available.

Tancred says:
“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” — Feynman

Henry says
:If you define religion as: seeking God’s face and asking Him to show you which is the way (to do good) and you define science as doing tests and measurements and evaluations to find out what to do (to do good), then it should not take you very long to figure out that science and religion are two paths that both must lead to the truth.

Appropriately, at this time of the year (Easter), it is always good to go back to what Jesus said when He was asked by Pilate (just before His death) : What is truth?

“Unfortunately Lindzen at the meeting chaired by Monckton at the Palace of Westminster accused GISS of manipulating data to show a false trend. On further investigation it transpired that Lindzen’s source had made a mistake and no such manipulation had taken place! Lindzen has since apologized for his mistake.”

I do NOT believe you!

What you choose to believe or not doesn’t concern me. You already revealed your ‘confirmation bias’ above: “I know Richard Lindzen’s track-record so I trust what he says unless and until shown he has made an error.”
Now that you have been shown that he has made an error and apologized for it perhaps you’ll rethink that policy?
It’s incidentally a similar error to the one you made, confirmation bias, he saw a graph that favored his point of view and used it in his presentation, without doing due diligence and checking it (or acknowledging the source apparently).

Provide evidence for your assertions or apologise. On face value your assertions are merely another set of lies and smears from an anonymous internet troll who promotes the AGW scare.

Easily done, you could have easily found it yourself (like Lindzen) before posting your false accusations, I take it an apology will be forthcoming from you? Note how it now becomes “Hayden’s error” whereas no acknowledgement of the source occurs on the slide.

Lord Monckton, I pointed out to him at least two years ago that his modus operandi, basically made him a non-scientist. He got stuff published in minor journals to make out like he was capable of doing research. Naaaah.

Physicists will be interested in your conclusion that Physical Review Letters is a minor journal!

If you follow his posts for the last year or two, you will see that he is incapable of learning the basics of not starting with the conclusion, something that would not allow conferring a Ph.D. where I studied.

It goes like this:

…

Yet, in this very thread, the people who have been shown to be guilty of confirmation bias are those who refused to believe that Lindzen had made an error until it was shown that Lindzen himself has admitted to the error! This fact gives little incentive for people who tell “AGW skeptics” what they want to hear to correct their errors, since apparently many of these AGW skeptics will continue to believe them without question as long as they don’t admit to being wrong.

The answer: because ad hominem attacks are easy and cowardly, therefore the alarmist contingent adopts those tactics.

What then is your explanation for Monckton’s frequent employment of them?
Just look at the piece which started this thread:
“Greens too yellow to admit they’re really Reds”
“a quaveringly bossy woman with messy blonde hair ”
“The yakking crowd”
In his own post here: “the fourteenth-rate bible college”
and the famous “overcooked prawn” reference.

In America truth is an absolute defense, so that can’t be libel. And as I tried to make clear, the cowardice is on the part of people like Michael Mann and the rest, who hide out from any fair, moderated debate in a public venue, with the Moderator and rules chosen by mutual agreement [the Question decided by the debate hosting organization], in front of a truly ramdomly selected audience. Because when that happens the alarmist crowd typically loses the debate.

So, Phil, since you’re so concerned. why don’t you challenge Lord Monckton to a public debate? I’ve challenged you in the past to submit an article to WUWT defending the catastrophic AGW conjecture, but you declined with silence. I would personally love to see you defend the climate alarmist argument in a real debate. What do you say? Yes? No? Too busy? Sorry, I have a dentist appointment on that day?…

Your post at March 13, 2012 at 10:06 am is (to say the very least) lame.

It is too long for me to copy all of it so I ask others to refer to it when considering this response.

Contrary to your untrue assertion, I do NOT have a “confirmation bias”.
As my statement you quote says, my consideration of your unsubstantiated assertion concerning Lindzen was based on my assessment of Lindzen’s track-record.

Assessment of Lindzen’s track-record is a conclusion from empirical data: only members of the cult of AGW think conclusions from empirical data are “confirmation bias”.

And I explained why I did not believe you with clear evidence. Anyway, what makes you think anybody would believe unsubstantiated assertions about an honourable man (i.e. Lindzen) from an internet troll who hides behind anonymity?

Your claim that I should have looked for evidence to support your claims is straight from the Michael Mann school of pseudoscience. You made the claim and you – only you – has any responsibility for substantiating it.

Now you and “Louise” (who also hides behind anonymity) claim to provide evidence for your unsubstantiated assertion by providing this link

(I find it interesting that you use the same link as “Louise” had done previously. People of a suspicious mind might think you had nothing to support your assertion until she made her post.)

But as Steve (Paris) says of that link in his reply to “Louise” which he posted at March 13, 2012 at 7:46 am:
“Lindzen apologises for one chart and is very candid about the reasons for his error. No hiding the decline. I don’t see any blanket apology for saying GISS manipulates data, which it does constantly.”

Anybody can read the link and see that is true.

So, a reasonable assessment of your behaviour on this matter is, ‘Poor effort. Must do better’.

Nobody makes the point that a correlation, however convincing, does not prove causation. Also nobody mentioned that in the Carboniferous period, 360 million years ago carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three times the amount it is today, but the temperature was the same as it is today. So carbon dioxide does not cause global warming.

Just briefly adding my thanks to Lord Monckton for this superb addition to the argument against the climate alarmists dogma and my admiration for his patient and measured responses within the comments. And well written Justin.

Nobody makes the point that a correlation, however convincing, does not prove causation. Also nobody mentioned that in the Carboniferous period, 360 million years ago carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was three times the amount it is today, but the temperature was the same as it is today. So carbon dioxide does not cause global warming.

… unless one examines snowball earth cycles, or considers the impact of historical changes in solar radiance and paleogeography on surface temperature. The rational individual then might come to a different view. It’s great how you make the “nobody claims” comment followed immediately by an errant implied then explicit claim. ☺

HenryP says:
March 13, 2012 at 8:46 am
…
Mr. Green, after insulting Lord Monckton, I had asked you to produce some test results from tests or observations that you had obtained yourself that would somehow prove to me (us) that modern warming (i.e. the warming observed in the past 4 decades) was not natural or largely not natural. You have done no such thing. That leaves us all to conclude that you are an ……?

Anyway, the best way to a good debate/discussion between the “believers” and “unbelievers” would be for each side to chose a representative and then for a scientific journal or magazine to produce a set of questions to which each representative must give his/her own answers. In that way, each side can have some time to consider each question and give good reasoned answers, backed by good (time consuming) thought processes and referenced by good research, if available.

Henry, I think the concept you describe in the second paragraph is a good one. The thread here at WUWT intended from direct interaction between Mr. Monckton and Mr. Hadfield, a written format, is a significant step in that very direction. Monckton slunk away, and for very good reason … his actions have been indefensible.

Sorry if I tweaked your sensibilities, Henry, but Mr. Monckton has earned his insults the old fashioned way. He’s a charlatan with excellent presentation skills. I don’t need to bring into this thread the very well documented, and often posted, irrefutable evidence of Mr. Monckton’s dishonest techniques. It’s those techniques that are insulting to those interested in honest dialog.

“This means that over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the atmospheric greenhouse effect.”

Henry says
You quote a paper but I am not sure exactly what you want to say. Can you be more specific when you quote from a paper?>
As I said, I established the warming of the last 40 years to be largely natural:

Therefore, note that in this particular case where you claim warming as a result of more CO2 it is the other way around:
heat+ HCO3- => CO2 + OH-,
very similar to you boiling water to remove the CO2. I hope your chemistry is that good that you can understand that reaction?It is or should be taught at college. More CO2 is coming in the atmosphere as a result of more(natural) warming. There are many of gigga tons of carbonate lying in the oceans. That is why the millions odd old records sometimes show higher CO2 than what we have at present…

If you want to prove to me that more CO2 causes more warming than cooling you have to come to me with a balance sheet.
I wonder if you are clever enough to get what I am saying here:

“This means that over the long term there is indeed a correlation between CO2 and paleotemperature, as manifested by the atmospheric greenhouse effect.”

Henry says
You quote a paper but I am not sure exactly what you want to say. Can you be more specific when you quote from a paper?>
As I said, I established the warming of the last 40 years to be largely natural:

Therefore, note that in this particular case where you claim warming as a result of more CO2 it is the other way around:
heat+ HCO3- => CO2 + OH-,
very similar to you boiling water to remove the CO2. I hope your chemistry is that good that you can understand that reaction?It is or should be taught at college.

Heat up water and some of the CO2(aq) will desorb into the air and all the equilibria will shift accordingly.
Add CO2 to the air and some will be dissolved and all the equilibria will shift so the CO2 (gas) goes up and the aqueous components go up to according to the equilibria.

Evan Green says:
Henry, I think the concept you describe in the second paragraph (quoted below) is a good one.

“Anyway, the best way to a good debate/discussion between the “believers” and “unbelievers” would be for each side to chose a representative and then for a scientific journal or magazine to produce a set of questions to which each representative must give his/her own answers. In that way, each side can have some time to consider each question and give good reasoned answers, backed by good (time consuming) thought processes and referenced by good research, if available”.

Henry@Evan
I did think about this for a while, and I do appreciate this thought from you, when clearly at this time we are coming from totally different worlds, as far as scientific thinking is concerned.. Notwithstanding Lord Monckton’s very excellent (instant) reasoning powers, my first choice for the “non-believers” in AGW would be Anthony Watts because he clearly has access to all the information he needs at his fingertips + he would be able to call on a lot of sceptical scientists, without reserve, including Lord Monckton I’m sure, should he not be sure about his answers.
I am not sure who you would want to represent your side. Hansen and Mann made horrible mistakes and the others were dumb enough to follow him….

Henry says:
Any chemistry student knows that the first smoke from the (warmed) water in a kettle is the CO2 being released. So, quite a number of scientists have reported that the increases of CO2 in the atmosphere in the past lagged the warming periods by quite a few hundred years. e.g. see here:

John West says:
March 11, 2012 at 8:04 am
Myrrh says:
“No back-radiation is observed”

Yes it is. Take any IR temperature thermometer (Infrared Temperature Gun) outside at night, point it up to the sky and press the button. What you’ll read is the equivalent temperature to the “backradiation” commonly called the greenhouse effect, that’s what the instrument is measuring, not the temperature of some distant planet.
Please read:

I can confirm that when I took “Heat Transfer” in the ’80′s we used that same equation for estimating cooling. Note the equation calculates the NET radiation by subtracting the ambient temperature to the fourth power (AIR) from the temperature of the cooling object to the fourth power(SURFACE) and then multiplying by the emissivity and the Stefan-Boltzmann Constant. Algebraically this is IDENTICAL to calculating the objects radiation and the “backradiation” separately with the Stefan-Boltzmann equation and then subtracting the back radiation from the object’s radiation. Basically, it’s subtracting the “backradiation” from the cooling object’s radiation based on the Stefan-Boltzmann Law and Engineers (not known for accounting for anything that violates Laws of Physics) have been doing this for decades.

(Note: I used the word estimating because the atmosphere isn’t technically a grey body, but Stefan-Boltzmann still works good enough for most Engineering applications.)

========

Sorry I’ve not been able to come back to replying earlier. I’ve now read your links and think you’ve missed the point about “no backradiation is observed” – the context.

The context is not cooling, but Latour’s correction of Spencer’s standard AGW Greenhouse Effect from the KT97 and variations claim. “Yes, Virginia..”, in Latour’s reply “No, Virginia” – it relates directly to Spencer’s claim that backradiation from colder will heat the hotter. This is the “radiation which is not observed”. Ever. In real world industries. The 2nd Law is violated by Spencer and Latour explains why.

It is never observed – if you say it is observed then please do give something better than an off-the-wall “thought experiment” violating the 2nd Law, without any real world examples to back that up, no real experiments and no examples from industry.

Just as there are zilch examples from industry of minute quantities of carbon dioxide backradiating to heat up further the source of heat – and your links don’t cover that. What they do show is that without cloud cover the Earth cools more rapidly, hey, why isn’t all the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere backradiating not only to delay that, but backradiating heat to the Earth as Spencer defends the fictional AGW energy budget?

Anyway, as I make the point here, The Greenhouse Effect is non-existant regardless of this mangling of real world physics, the comic cartoon of shortwave in and longwave out is stupid enough in claiming ‘that visible light heats ocean and lands and the heat direct from the Sun, thermal infrared, doesn’t reach the Earth’s surface and doesn’t play any part in heating land and ocean’, but, this warmist comic cartoon energy budget misses out the whole of the Water Cycle! Without water the Earth would be 67°C, think deserts, therefore ‘greenhouse gases’ don’t warm the Earth, they cool it!

Carbon dioxide is fully part of that water cycle where water heated by the thermal infrared direct from the Sun evaporates and anyway lighter than air rises in air and takes away heat from the surface – all pure clean rain is carbonic acid, the water vapour spontaneously joining with carbon dioxide in the atmosphere releases its heat in the colder heights and condenses out back into liquid water and ice, cooling the Earth from the 67°C it would be without the water cycle.

This is bog-standard, traditional well known tried and tested and used in industries everyday knowledge physics, that’s how weather systems work – you ‘warmists’ who say that carbon dioxide warms the Earth are spouting junk physics, you’re describing an imaginary world, not this one.

The Greenhouse Effect of ‘greenhouse gases warm the Earth 33°C to 15°C’ is a fiction, and promoted as it is, is a science fraud.

Latour “To recap, Spencer did not correctly describe how radiating plates work; how a blanket works or how the atmosphere works. There is no Green House in the sky. Cooler objects cannot make warmer objects even warmer still. QED.”

Henry@Evan
I did think about this for a while, and I do appreciate this thought from you, when clearly at this time we are coming from totally different worlds, as far as scientific thinking is concerned.. Notwithstanding Lord Monckton’s very excellent (instant) reasoning powers, my first choice for the “non-believers” in AGW would be Anthony Watts because he clearly has access to all the information he needs at his fingertips + he would be able to call on a lot of sceptical scientists, without reserve, including Lord Monckton I’m sure, should he not be sure about his answers.
I am not sure who you would want to represent your side. Hansen and Mann made horrible mistakes and the others were dumb enough to follow him….

Unfortunately Henry, Anthony’s hearing impairment would mitigate against his performing well in a debate. I’d stick with The Good Lord for debating against CAGW. The pro side would be interesting if taken by Mike Hulme. His book Why We Disagree About Climate Change is an fascinating read.

Unfortunately Henry, Anthony’s hearing impairment would mitigate against his performing well in a debate.

Henry says

A debate was not the idea.
My proposal was this:
“Anyway, the best way to a good debate/discussion between the “believers” and “unbelievers” would be for each side to chose a representative and then for a scientific journal or magazine to produce a set of questions to which each representative must give his/her own answers. In that way, each side can have some time to consider each question and give good reasoned answers, backed by good (time consuming) thought processes and referenced by good research, if available”.
.

Sorry, I see now that it looked that I was contradicting myself. My idea was a Q&A “debate” in a scientific journal, the questions to be raised by the the editors of the journal/ magazine and then submitted to the two representatives. The whole article with the Q&A by both parties would be published in the journal/magazine and could then later also be published on blogs for general discussion.

Alternatively a blog could also work but write access restricted to the two chosen representatives who could then also give replies to each other answers.
If we chose the latter, the rules must be clear from the start, e.g.who formulates the questions, the length of the answers (to keep it readable) etc. and how the public should be able to have access to the Q&A on the blog but just so it cannot participate in the discussion.

A public discussion or debate (on radio or TV) often does not result in sound science or scientific reasoning because emotions and nerves play a bigger role.

But don’t you think the whole subject of ‘climate change’ has almost reached the stage of being academic or theoretical? That it’s more a philosophical question now, than a scientific one?

For every fact put up by one side to support their argument, a counter claim is made by the other side. For every ‘expert’ quoted on one side, the other side will find something to discredit that person’s findings. And so the revelations go on… with jaw-dropping regularity.

I simply cannot envisage either side backing down, holding up their hands and admitting: “I’m sorry, I was wrong all along”. Far too much money has been wasted, too many careers put on the line, over the last forty years and more for that ever to happen. Time is going to be the only arbiter. And time is running out for the warmists, as predictions they have made fail to materialise. Future historians will judge.

Climate systems, being recognised as ‘chaotic’, will not conform to man’s idea of principles of physics – there are too many unknowns. If weather forecasters can’t even guarantee that their predictions for next week will be correct, how can ‘climatologists’ guarantee what the climate will be like in x numbers of years hence, no matter how many millions are spent on super-computers? As we all know if you feed garbage in you get garbage out.

But there again, many people, myself included, believe that the whole climate debate was tailored to a political agenda and not to any sincere belief in facts. Or if they did have belief in the very beginning, they found themselves in too deep to extricate themselves when realisation hit them.

I think the analogy of the AGW theory being synonomous with religion is undeniable: they are both belief systems without irrefutable supporting evidence of the existence of that which they claim. Humans are psychologically primed to seek and assimilate (religious) beliefs, dating back to the dawn of mankind. Every culture has had a religion. And in both religion and in AGW, one wonders (for it is not possible to confirm categorically) whether or not the leading proponents have total faith in what they preach. But the followers are fired with a religious, and often fanatical, confidence that they are right.

To my mind, the only change that will come about from these discussions/debates, and which make the quest for truth so important, is that people whose minds are not already made up and who will take one side or the other, according to their understanding and the strength of the argument as they perceive it, will vote for whom to elect to represent their point of view in government. In sufficient numbers these votes will effect change. That is why the debates must surely continue, lest one side should gain more ground and thereby supporters, than the other. (With which I seem to have answered my opening question, lol.)

The only way that dinosaurs and other giant animals could have exisited on earth (many millions of years ago) was because there were enormous amounts of plants and greenery available for them to eat from. That is where our enormous reserves of coal and oil actually came from. We know from the records that in those days CO2 was many times higher then what it is now. So to now put a limit on CO2 in the air is as stupid as to ask for a limit on H2O. Both are needed to stimulate growth. Unless you want to live in desert?
So, the problem is now that (C)AGW really stands in the way of progress. That is why we have to tackle their “religion”. It is based on lies. That makes it a FALSE religion.
For example: the next step in human progress would be to terraform Mars. You want to try that with 400 ppm’s of CO2 in the atmosphere when you know that 10 x that much is going to make things grow so much faster?
(they already use up to 8000 ppm’s in real greenhouses to stimulate growth ).

For those paying attention, we are still patiently waiting for the link to John Tyndall’s “easily replicable” experiment that demonstrates the CO2 absorption/scattering causing heating at the bottom of a container where convection is unrestrained. I’m relaxed and singing a cheerful song while I wait. All is well.

……there is no closed box experiment that can work to prove that more of a GH gas causes more warming than cooling……
If you donot get why that is so you have to go back to CO2 re-radiation 101 and try and figure it out for yourself:

Henry P: “The whole article with the Q&A by both parties would be published in the journal/magazine and could then later also be published on blogs for general discussion.”

This is a useful idea for airing the issues, although I doubt that further discussion on blogs would add much to the sort of debates we already see.

However, such a format would obviate some of the more egregious aspects of the live debate format, such as those reported in the opinion piece that heads this post.

Assuming the accuracy of the account, Lord Monckton’s masterful smackdown of the professor of environmental science is just the sort of gladiatorial move that excites the punters.

The article above recounts an incident where the professor requests a show of hands from the students in support of a claim against Monckton. Monckton turns this around by questioning the authority of the students: “how many of [the students] were statisticians”.

This is despite his apparent distaste for this argument in his discussion with the “quaveringly bossy woman”. One might argue that Monckton is simply using his opponent’s argument against him, and that Monckton has no truck with the argument from authority, except that to top off his smackdown Monckton appeals to his own authority: the unnamed statistician.

As noted, Monckton also appeals to consensus in claiming that it is “generally accepted that a doubling of CO2 concentration would cause 1 C° of warming in the absence of temperature feedbacks”.

Unnoted is his appeal to pity: the trichiasis sufferers.

Of course, in the heat of the moment, these sorts of theatrical wiles go unnoticed, simply because in the cut and thrust there is little time to consider the arguments. Thus, a “win” tends to be impressionistic, and very often an outcome of partiality.

That said, debates, whether live or on paper, can be useful devices for identifying the issues. However, they should not be mistaken for the practice of science.

Justin: it is absolutely exhilarating to read your deeply-moving precis of Lord’s stylish delivery…. as I was reading your words…. the incomparably-sharp Monckton manner and uncanny insights shine as if I’m watching the great non-scientist in video. Wonderful article

While Lord Monckton’s delivery is stylish, his argument is flawed. He beings by asserting the existence of the quantity that he calls “the climate sensitivity.” A more revealing name for it is “the equilibrium climate sensitivity”(TECS). TECS is the quantity

(T – T0)/log(C/C0)

where T represents the equilibrium temperature at which the CO2 concentration is C, TO represents the equilibrium temperature at which the CO2 concentration is C0 and the base of the logarithm is 2. Monckton implies that TECS is a constant but as the equilibrium temperature is not an observable, this implication is non-falsifiable and thus unscientific.

As a scientific argument is falsifiable by reference to observed events, it has to be based upon the complete set of observed and unobserved events that underlie the associated inquiry, the so-called “statistical population” of the study. However, no such population yet exists for the inquiry into anthropogenic global warming.

Global warming makes as much sense as Einstein’s theory of relativity: both are bogus; both make nonsense; both are backed by rockerfella blood-money. Oh, albert didn’t get it all wrong?!…try googling Dayton C Miller, who spent a lifetime refuting the (admittedly…just ask his teachers!) stupid Einstein. But no, you dumb schmucks would rather beleive in CONSENSUS cf NONSENSUS

Lord Monkcton educating those snotty nosed liberals who are the most intolerant filth on the planet. Global warming is a scam to enslave us to global taxes and transer the world’s wealth. Complete rubbish.

As education in the US Public Schools has more and more become UN GREEN indoctrination, the santicmony of our 20-something academic generation is on a slippery slope (not caused by melting ice caps) to the destruction of our nation. To their benefit, I suggest study of that pre-Civil War and Civil War era conflict between the pro-industrial American Whigs vs. the “Free Trade” Tories, with Mathew Carey, Henry Clay and his “American System” of political economy, Abe Lincoln, and William Kelley on the one side, and William Lloyd Garrison, Nathan Rothschild, August Belmont, John Stuart Mills, and Harriet Beecher Stowe championing the other. “The Civil War and the American System” America’s Battle With Britain 1860-1876. Author; W. Allen Salisbury. I bouhgt a copy for like $3 on amazon.com

Joseph Henry in his grave says three cheers for Lord Monckton!!!
…. I suggest study of that pre-Civil War and Civil War era conflict between the pro-industrial American Whigs vs. the “Free Trade” Tories, with Mathew Carey, Henry Clay and his “American System” of political economy, Abe Lincoln, and William Kelley on the one side, and William Lloyd Garrison, Nathan Rothschild, August Belmont, John Stuart Mills, and Harriet Beecher Stowe championing the other. “The Civil War and the American System” America’s Battle With Britain 1860-1876. Author; W. Allen Salisbury…..
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Thanks for the heads up. At this point we can no longer separate the “Science” from the politics since it is no longer an academic “controversy” but the basis for a radical transformation of our world economy.